Conceptual setup in private lab using public IP's

[ubergum]

Hi all,

I'm struggling to get my head wrapped around a concept which I'm currently working on.

The ideal setup:


The lab setup, including OPNSense, is virtualised inside VMware ESXi. All hosts in in the lab are configured with public IP's and should be accessible from the Internet. No traffic should ever leave the lab network except for traffic to the VPN clients. All traffic from the clients, should be routed through the tunnel.

Done so far:

• Lab nodes, with public ip's and core routing in place.
• Sonicwall port forwarding to OPNSense (port 1194)
• OpenVPN configured (attempted)

I can see incoming traffic on port 1194 in OPNSense, but the client is getting a timeout. This is well aligned with the observation of no outbound traffic on port 1194 in OPNSense and I assume the configuration of OpenVPN is incorrect.

Further, I have assumed that LAN will be the network with the public IP's and WAN is connected to Sonicwall's internal network (192.168.168.0/24)

The overall question is if this concept is even possible in practice and if so, can it be achieved by utilising OPNSense?   

Any  view on this is highly appreciated.