How to setup Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition on VM Ware ESXi 5.5

Note: Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition as name suggests only for home use and non-production environments.

Since I am an IT consultant I prefer to do the most, if not all, of my network testing in my home lab prior deploying it to my customer's production network. So in order to do so I have setup myself a small WM ESXi and couple of VM computers. Now I need a firewall that would do more then just regular SMB firewall. Picked Sophos as per my friend Eric's Stewart (Thank you!) recommendation.

So where do we start and what do we need?

1. Pre-requisites:

a. We assume that you have working VM Ware environment and WAN and VLAN switches already created.

Note: In the example bellow VM Network refers to the network interface connected to your ISP connection, Public interface. VLAN2 refers to an internal, private switch.

b. Minimum hardware requirement to install for home use (1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB of hard disk space) but the more the better. If installed on hardware make sure you assign enough of disk space as it won't be possible to expend later.

2. Download Software required

• Navigate to https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-xg-firewall-home-edition.aspx and click on Download button.

• Confirm that price is right :-) and click on Get Started button.

• Fill in name and an email address and click on Submit. An email will be set to you with serial number that you will use to register firewall during setup.

• Download the ISO file you want to install (e.g. "SW-SFOS_17.0.6_MR-6-181.iso") and save it to your datastore or some other location.

• Now it is time to create a new virtual machine in your virtualization environment. In my case it is VM ESXi5.5.

2. Create a new Virtual Machine

• Select your VM host and click on File>New>Virtual Machine

Select Typical. Click on Next

Type the name of your VM e.g. Sophos XG Fiewall or Sophos Home, it does not really matter.

Just select a destination datastorage for your VM files e.g. datastore1 and hit Next

Select Operating System and click on Next.

Create at the minimum two network interfaces. NIC1 will be your private side, aka LAN IP. NIC2 will be your WAN interface.

Change the size of your hard disk to a minimum of 10GB of disk space. Select Thin provisioning.

Select Edit and Continue

Change RAM size to at least 1GB if not more.

Click on New CD/DVD and select New Datastore ISO file and click on Browse. Navigate to where you downloaded your ISO file from the beginning of this document. Selct it and click OK. Select also Connect at power on.Then Finish.

• New Sophos Firewall VM is created but shut down.

• Right Click on it and select Open Console

• Right click on it again and select Power>Power On. Your VM installation starts booting from ISO file and will continue until completed. Then reboots.

• You will be presented with following screen

• Type default password which is lower case word admin and hit Enter

• From this point on you need to initialize and configure time and date, admin password, NIC1 and two etc.

• Once done go to your browser and type the LAN IP address in following format: https://<LAN IP_address>:4444 and hit Enter.

• Your browser may complain about certificate but proceed anyway.

Click on Go on to the webpage

Enter user name and password as admin/admin and hit Login

Now you need to register with the serial number you’ve received in your email during ISO download. Click Continue.

Main UI opens and from this point on you can do rest of your configuration using graphic user interface.