When I got my first real IT job I knew I wanted to learn more.
I was exposed to all sorts of new technologies and implementations I had never seen before.
However I quickly ran into a wall when I wanted to learn more; there wasn’t any real time for me to do so during work hours, and they weren’t keen on educating me (part of the reason I left).

After recycling gobs and gobs of old tech from clients I finally got my chance.

A client we had recently picked up had shortly before our moving in, converted most of their infrastructure to virtual machines.
This left several told, but viable, Dell T610s at my fingertips.
My supervisor wanted one in the office for us to experiment with, but everything else was at my discretion.

With that, I wanted to set up a place at the office and a place at home, to simulate a growing trend amongst our clients of remote offices.
I needed to keep it small however, so as not to waste space and not get in trouble for taking too much power.

Setting up with a dedicated firewall and switch at the office was a non-starter.
Lab space was tight.
So what to do?
Would it really be possible for me to do what I’m shooting for within the limits given to me?
I know I wanted to virtualize everything, can I virtualize a firewall?!

Well, at the time I was still pretty new to all of this and had only dealt with physical appliances.
So I did some digging and quickly found that YES, I CAN create a virtual firewall!

After getting more familiar with my options and how I wanted to it laid out, I quickly found I could put all my eggs in one basket.
Yes, I know, but this was all for a learning lab, if it blew up, I’m not out anything.

So after pouring over my hypervisor choices (VMWare ESXi at the time), and virtual firewall (pfSense, which I still use), I got to work.

I’ll go over the basic layout and how it went in another post.