Hi I am new to understanding networking and virtual switch set ups so bear with me here. I have VMWare Workstation 17 installed on a Windows 10 Pro Host laptop. I am creating a lab environment for cybersecurity testing. So far, my VMs are set up as follows:
PFSense:
1 NAT NIC
1 vmnet2 host-only NIC
Inside PFSense, I configured 3 VLANs, labelled VLAN10, VLAN20, VLAN30. The VLANs use DHCP. Default firewall rule for now is to allow any incoming/outgoing for the VLANs.
Since VMWare Workstation does not specifically have a configuration option to connect to a tagged VLAN ID, I found a work around to use Hyper-V.
I created an External vswitch that is bridged to the VMware virtual adapter vmnet2, the same as what the PFSense NIC 2 is connected to.
Then, I ran a powershell command to create 3 other adapters that use the External switch:
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name “VLANX” -SwitchName “External” -Passthru | Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -Access -VlanId X
Where X is the vlan ID # I set in pfsense. I did this for all 3 of the VLANs.
In VMWares virtual network editor, I then added vmnet3,4 and 5 with bridged connections to each of the hyper-v vlan adapters I created.
- Vmnet3=VLAN10
- Vmnet4=VLAN20
- Vmnet5=VLAN30
I have an Ubuntu-server VM and connected that to the vmnet3 NIC, and when I checked it’s IP, it correctly assigned the IP based on my configuration for VLAN10, and the ping test works from Ubuntu to PFSense and vice versa.
I connected a Kali Linux VM to vmnet4 and again, correct IP address assignment and ping test works from kali to PFSense, and also Kali to Ubuntu.
My issue now is my NAT NIC on PFSense is not connecting to the internet. And not only that, my host windows 10 laptop is intermittently not connecting to the internet either.
I tried disabling packet coalescing on my WIFI adapter and anything saying “coalescing” in the hyper-v adapters in Device Manager settings based on other forum answers, I also tried restarting VMware NAT in services.msc.
I tried shutting everything off and restarting my entire laptop and internet connection was restored, but then when I connected to my VMs in VMware, NAT would work for 5 mins and then it would stop working and my hosts internet would also stop working again.
This leads me to think there may be an issue with how I configured the Vswitch and VLANS, or maybe just an issue with hyper-v and VMware running simultaneously. But I dont have any VMs running in hyper-v, just using it for the external vswitch.
Assistance and advise on this would be much appreciated! Also I don’t know if this is the right forum to post this on but if anyone could provide a better forum for advice that would be appreciated as well.
