How is select a switch type and port group to connect my LAN to my WAN (ISP) new setup vSphere 5.5 SXI 5.5, VMwarre ESXi 5.5.0

[VMMyke]

  I have been working on setting up a pFsense 2.1 firewall in vSphere 5.5. My ISP is Cox Cable Business internet and I have three static IP addresses assigned to me in a /17.  Would like to fully or in part dedicate one of my four Nics to this. The issues I am having trouble with is what kind of Connection type to use either virtual Machine or VMkernel.   The next question is would I want to use a vSphere standard switch or a vSwitch. Where and how do I set up my IP settings from the ISP.  I am running straight out of my cable modem into 1 of four Nics. Fail over would be nice to have a pool of two nics for physical WAN access if possible. Along as I can use the two NICs for other networks. I am willing to dedicate just one Nic to all WAN access if needed.  This a home network / lab.

1. Questions.
   1. What kind of Connection type to use either virtual Machine or VMkernel.
   2. Do want to use a vSphere standard switch or a vSwitch. Where and how do I set up my IP settings from the Cox Cable?
   3. What / How do I assigned the 3 static ISP Cox Cable provided me into vSphere.   They are a /17 so 3 IP public IP’s.

My local LAN runs on a 10.1.50/24. The firewall is going to provide DHCP, DNS, and be my local gateway until I build my Microsoft 2012 AD server that will then provide local DNS, DHCP and DC services.

Local hardware I have a is a Dell PE 2850 running VMwarre ESXi 5.5.0, a 16-Port GS116EProSafe Plus Gig Switch, 2  Iomega StorCenter ix2-dl-200 NAS units that I use for local NSA disk space and each one is running iscsi with 1tb iscis data stores connected to vSphere.  A Netgear WND2000v4 as my gateway now that I plan to pull out or use as a WAP to my local lan only later.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I am open to questions and comments.  My primary goal with that post is to get my local lan talking to my WAN and using pfSense as my router, Fw, DNS, dhcp so on and so forth.

  I hope this gives you a good idea of what I am trying to accomplish.

[weinstein5]

1) The connectioin type depends on what you want to connect to - a vmkernel port is used to connect to management interfaces of the ESXi host - so you would use a vmkernel for managing the ESXi host, vmotion, FT amd iSCSI traffic. A virtual machine port group is used to so VMs can communicate to each and to physical networks, So you will want to use a virtual machine port group for your pfSenes applicance and your VMs, when two VMs are connected to the same port froup they will be able to communicate to each other.

2) I am not sure what you mean by vSwitch - there are two types of virtual switches that are available to you from VMware - Virtual Standard Switch (vSS) and Virtual DItributed Switch (vDS) - vSS is available with ESXi while the vDS requires ESXi and vCenter - since you did not mention vCenter I assume you are not using it so your only option is the vSS. IP addresses will be set in your pfSense router

3) The three public address will be defined gain in the pfSense router as it is the deived that will translate public addresses to the ones on your private network.