I’m building a small SOC/home‑lab and I’m struggling with the networking in VirtualBox. I’d like some advice on the correct way to wire this so that:
All lab VMs live on their own subnet(s), not directly on my home LAN. Lab machines can reach the Internet through pfSense which would be the internal router and firewall, but nothing in the lab is directly on my real LAN.
I have two laptops, one running Windows 11 and the other running Ubuntu. The one running Ubuntu has Windows Server 2019 running on it. I have my reasons for doing so which I will state later on, while the other has pfSense and other VMs on it.
I have three adapters on pfSense. Adapter 1 is on NAT and adapter 2 is on internal network with the name LAN. I previously used this set up for VMs on the Windows 11 machine where all of the machines were behind the pfSense firewall and weren’t in contact with my real LAN with pfSense acting as the router. I want to do similar but with Windows Server VM on a different host machine.
I initially put them all on bridged adapter and they all communicated successfully then I wanted the Windows Server to have pfSense as it’s router and not my home router so I put it’s adapter on internal network with the name LAN as I did previously but this did not work.
I am using different laptops because I don’t have enough RAM to host all machines at the same time on one. I want to know if this is really possible or I would have to resort to using bridged adapter alone.
