Create a virtual router to provide Internet access to a virtual LAN

In this tutorial, I’ll be talking about connecting a virtual LAN network created using VirtualBox to a physical LAN segment with Internet access. The reason for this tutorial is to demonstrate that it is possible to create a virtual environment that closely mimics a production company LAN network in functionality. This includes being able to run services such as DHCP and DNS on your virtual LAN environment and using a router to provide access to the Internet.

My virtual LAN is setup as follows:

• Network: 10.0.0.0/8
• Router/Gateway: 10.0.0.1 (this is the device we’ll be configuring in this tutorial)
• DNS: 10.0.0.100 (my active directory domain controller named dc.dyndns.local)
• DNS suffix: dyndns.local

My physical LAN is setup as follows:

• Network: 192.168.1.1/24
• Router/Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (a verizon router)
• DNS: 192.168.1.1 (same verizon router)
• My computer (virtual machine host): 192.168.1.4 (via dhcp from the verizon router)

[requirements]

• VirtualBox v4.3.8 – https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
• VirtualBox extension pack v4.3.8 – https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
• pFsense x86 (32bit) – https://www.pfsense.org/download/index.html