pfSense in active-passive failover with single WAN?

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From the information I've researched so far, I don't think this is possible to achieve with a single DHCP leased WAN IP address. But has anyone here done something like this?

My modem is connected directly to the physical switch in a VLAN, which has the LAGGs for both my ESXi hosts configured with a vSwitch in the same VLAN. pfSense is then routing between this vSwitch in the WAN VLAN to the rest of the LAN. This is working nicely and will 'failover' if I manually vMotion the pfSense VM to the other host (my ESXi hosts don't share the same hardware config or datastore so FT and automatic vMotion are out), but what would be cool is to have a pair of pfSense VMs running simultaneously sharing their config.

I'm doing this with Zen Load Balancer - when one is down the heartbeat between them fails and the remaining server automatically ups the interfaces and claims the IP addresses, and only a few packets are lost. I'd love to achieve that with pfSense too...

Any suggestions? :)
 
Pete, standard CARP isn't going to work with just the one WAN IP address. The question is more about achieving this by some other means that I haven't thought of/found yet :)
 
Np, thanks anyway Pete :)

With regards the MAC address, the WAN interface in pfSense has the MAC spoofed to match an old 10/100 NIC I first started using with NTL about 10 years ago. If there was a failover pfSense with the same MAC configured for its WAN interface then I'd have thought that would work as far as not confusing the modem?

Bit of a moot point though, I'll have to stick to migrating the VM as and when I need to. Terribly low tech :rolleyes: ;)
 
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