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I am trying to setup a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine, primarily DC and fileserver roles, in such a way that I would not need an extra router in our network, because I would like to have it inside Windows as a Virtual machine in Hyper-V.

So far, we have been using some old scrapped physical computers with installed pfSense BSD router distribution as our routers and in addition a physical Windows server machine. That is two PC's running. The problem is, that the old computers (routers):

  1. consume too much power
  2. tend to break down often

I've now been playing around with the new setup, as described in the first paragraph, but it is quite complicated and I am not sure if I am doing it right. So my questions are:

  1. Whether this new setup is possible to run and operate in production environment (for real)?
  2. Do I still really need to use legacy network adapters in VM (because all the guides I've found so far speak so)? Because I have tried to use default ones ("Network Adapter", each connected to one Virtual Switch connected as external to one physical NIC), and it seems to work, because when I boot pfSense, they appear normally there as "hn0", "hn1" and "hn2" devices (cannot post screenshot due to insufficient reputation)
  3. I will need 2 WANs, that is why I have 3 NICs (one is for LAN). I suppose it is correct to assign each physical NIC to one separated virtual switch in external mode (?), because if it was physical router, that is how it would be.
  4. Will VLAN work in such a setup? Because we have a managed switch tagging packets on some ports which is later being used in pfSense router to make these packets route through the second WAN.
  5. Would be better to run the Windows server virtually in Hyper-V, too? The primary role is DC and Fileserver, and I am concerned about fileserver performance in the virtualized environment...
  6. How to setup it all in such a way that the Windows server would be behind the virtualized pfSense router from the network point of view? I mean the Windows server itself should not be exposed directly to WAN, instead, it should be accesible through "LAN" only (and from WAN only using port forwarding in the router)
  7. for our LANs we are using 10.x.x.x subnets, I am using latest pfSense (2.2.2)

Thank you very much for help

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I know you posted this a few months ago, but in case you are still looking for this answer, I would install ESXi as the host rather than Windows Server, and then create a VM with PFSense on it and another VM with Windows Server for DC + Fileserver.

Perfomance on the Fileserver will be good as long as you give it enough CPU power and RAM. I have a fileserver on a VM on my Home Server (2012 R2) right now and can get speeds up to 600Mbps on file transfers... This is a Gigabit network.

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  • Thank you very much for a tip. Meanwhile, though, we have come up with a complete new network setup, so this question is not relevant any more in our context. But still might be useful for others, though... Thanks!
    – crysman
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 9:04
  • I thought so, but figured it would still be useful for someone else. Cheers!
    – Teio
    Commented Sep 30, 2015 at 8:57

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