Hey! I know this is maybe better suited for a VMWare group, but I can’t find one with the whole Reddit fiasco. So I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction or give a bit of advice.
I have VMWare Workstation 16 currently using NAT. This has been working well for a while, as whenever I need to open a port, I just manually do it one by one. But as I’ve been hosting game servers it’s becoming a bit tedious to do one by one and there’s not an option to open ports by ranges using NAT.
I read that Bridged is what is recommended for my use case. And I’ve tried this but can never get it to work. I’ve tried deselecting all but the main NIC too.
I rent a dedicated server, I only have access to one IP with the option to purchase a secondary IP. I’m guessing it’s because of this I can’t get Bridge to work, because I don’t have access to DHCP.
Is my only option to purchase a secondary IP, create a VM for PfSense and have that manage the DHCP? (That’s even if I’m understanding this correctly)
Or would installing something like EXSi achieve what I’m trying to do?
Many thanks in advance!
Purchasing a second IP won’t stop you from needing to forward ports. As long as you’re exposing services to the internet you’ll need to open and forward ports as any kind of firewall requires you to poke holes for the services you want people to access.
What you might be able to do if you just want port ranges is setup a PFsense VM with two virtual NICs, one bridged with the public IP you’re renting and one set to a VMware internal network (I think that’s the verbage VMware uses) as a LAN, then connect all of your individual virtual machines to that internal network. You would need to somehow access the PFsense webgui from an internal VM though as that shouldn’t ever be exposed to the outside internet, and there is the performance hit to consider if your server is at all resource constrained
From a networking standpoint there’s no difference between a VPS and a dedicated server. A VPS is just a VM that you’re renting sharing hardware with a bunch of other VMs rented by other customers, meanwhile a dedicated server is renting an entire server (I’ve also seen some services offering the middle ground of a dedicated CPU where you aren’t potentially sharing CPU cycles but still get the cost efficiency of sharing hardware. Still exactly the same from a networking standpoint though)
Why do you believe you need a second IP?
The issue I have isn’t about forwarding ports, it’s more of how I’m able to forward ports. The VMWare Workstation on NAT only allows me to forward a single port at a time which is extremely tedious. I understand that forwarding ports is required to expose services to the internet. So I’m trying to find a way to not use it. Bridged mode would be perfect if I could get it to work.
The pfsense situation seems perfect for what I need, the only problem I have is that it won’t bridge. (I tried the different options; replicating, and only selecting the nic that provides internet without any luck) I thought it didn’t work because I don’t have access to the hosts dhcp.
I believed that I needed a second IP for like what rs5th mentioned; One for management of the server, and the second to handle all the VM Network Traffic. When provided with the second IP, I’d set it up as a vNIC as a WAN going to pfsense, and a second vnic for the other vms. Exactly like how you described except from the bridging, seeing as I can’t get that to work.