How do I set up VLANs

Elili · March 3

Hello all! I’m running pfsense in a VM. My physical machine has 5 ethernet ports. The first one is the one on the motherboard which is the one i installed proxmox with (vmbr0) and set an ip address to. The other 4 are on an i350-t4. Two are unused and two are used as wan and lan for pfsense (vmbr1: wan. vmbr2: lan). Everything up until here works. Now, by following the tutorial by Raid Owl titled “Setting up VLANs in pfSense.” I set up a VLAN with ID 16. In order to test it I spun up an ubuntu machine and set its network interface to the same one pfsense uses a vlan (vmbr2) and set the vlan tag in proxmox to 16. The vm fails to establish a connection while that vlan tag is 16 but as soon as I remove it it connects to the internet perfectly.

My network looks like this:
ISP Modem > pfSense WAN (vmbr1)
pfSense LAN (vmbr2) > managed switch port 8
managed switch port 2 > proxmox (vmbr0)
managed switch port 1 > other devices

No VLAN configuration has been done to the switch and I’m limiting my testing to the ubuntu vm using vmbr2 directly in order to not introduce more things I could mess up (the switch configuration).

I also have a VLAN capable AP which I tried connecting and using VLAN 16 on but my phone couldn’t establish a connection either. I’m fairly sure the problem is in pfSense or Proxmox

I’ve been trying to fix this for like 3 days please help TT

Bdavis · March 6

You have to set up your vlan correctly in pfsense. Tom from Lawrence systems has the best pfsense YouTube tutorials.

LIGISTX · March 7

Firstly… don’t tie other VM’s to the NIC pfsense is using. Give pfsense exclusive access to that network card in Proxmox via passing that PCIe device through to Proxmox.

For VM’s you spin up within Proxmox, let it use proxmox’s ethernet connection (just leave it at default, which would then choose vmbr0 in your case), assign a vlan tag (assuming you checked the box in Proxmox settings to tell it this connection has vlans riding on it, I forget where that setting is…) and it’ll work.

From the way you are describing it, it sounds like you have it setup wrong. I agree with @Bdavis, give that Lawrence systems video (and maybe more of his videos) a watch as well.