ESXi, pfsense and failover IP – OVH

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I had great trouble getting this working initialy, mainly due to how OVH gives out failover IP. Here is the solution i came up with.

Create a virtual MAC for the failover IP in OVH Manager

1) Add an additional switch to VMware

2) Create a VM for pfSense, add 2 nics, one connected to each switch (ill call them wan and lan)

Id suggest having nic1 on WAN and nic to on LAN

3)Install pfSense

4)Add both NIC’s in pfsense. If you are using the above setup, WAN will be em0 and LAN will be em1

5)Enable DHCP on em1

6)Create a new VM, install or run the live cd of ubuntu.

7)Log into pfsense in the ubuntu vm and go to 192.168.1.1

8)Go to “interfaces” then “WAN”

9)Change type to static, change the MAC address to the one from ovh manager

10)Set the IP address to failover IP /32

11)Save the configuration.

Now, go back to the pfsense VM and select option 8 (shell)

Lets assume the IP address on my dedicated server (NOT the failover) is 1.2.3.4. In this section i needed to change the last octet to 254. so it would be 1.2.3.254

So i would type in this:

route add -net 1.2.3.254/32 -iface em0

Hit enter

route add default 1.2.3.254

Thats it. That worked for, can access the VM over the public address on the failover IP.

Not saying this will work for everyone..but it works for me.

At the moment, im having trouble with the ubuntu VM being able to get online though, but im working on it, likely my pfsense config somewhere.