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.

Hi! Thank for replying!

I certainly won’t disagree about misunderstanding, and thank you for explaining. I noticed you saying that for VPS I would certainly want to be using NAT, would that also apply for dedicated server? As that’s what I’m using and thought there was a difference. (Sorry if I come across as dense, it’s because I am dense haha.)

I would quite happily still use NAT if there was a way that I could open a range of ports for one of the VM’s. As I do want to expose that VM to the internet as it’ll be used for deploying several steam game servers.

Which is why I thought that my option would be to purchase a secondary IP, create a virtual nic using the details of that secondary ip, and create a pfsense vm and have that acting as a dhcp for the vm that I want to expose with a range of open ports.

I then thought that instead of purchasing a secondary ip, maybe I could still achieve this if I changed my host(currently windows) to proxmox or exsi to achieve what I’m hoping to try and do. But the more that I’m reading, the more I’m thinking I might just need that second ip.

Hey! Thanks for your reply!

Yeah, they are. I do use Nginx Proxy Manager to access some websites that way. I don’t see how I can do that with a range of ports with NPM without adding them one by one. Maybe that’s a NPM limitation? Or I’m not quite sure how.

I was kind of hoping that for example on the VM opens ports 8000-9000. And all I needed to do was on my Windows Server (Hosts the VM) allow ports 8000-9000 and it would all just work haha

But because it’s on NAT I have to use the Virtual Network Editor and add ports one by one.