Networking my VMbox...need suggestions!

[jimphreak]

I'm wondering what is the best way to set up my VMware box with regards to pfSense and ESXi 5.5. My VM box has 4 physical NICs (2 not being used) and I currently have 4 VMs running which are:

• pfSense (with Site-to-Site VPN to my second home)
• Media Sever (Plex which is HEAVILY used externally)
• Backup Server (Veeam for VMs and also run off-site backups for storage server across VPN)
• Torrent VM

Right now I only have 2 NICs in use for pfSense. One for my WAN connection and one for LAN which goes into a managed switch. That same NIC that is the LAN connection for pfSense is also what I have my other 3 VM's on and my vSphere management network.

Now it's all working however it just doesn't seem efficient to me to be sharing one gigabit connection between 4 VMs and my pfSense LAN interface. So I'm wondering if it would be best to dedicate one of my 2 spare NICs for my pfSense LAN interface and keep my other VMs on the current NIC.

So I'd have one NIC for WAN, one NIC for pfSense LAN going into my switch, and then one NIC coming from the switch back into the VM box to serve my other 3 VMs.

P.S. I will soon be VLANing off my other VMs, I just haven't worked out the best way to segment each one yet. I also plan to use one of the spare NICs for a dedicated Wireless interface (with a guest vlan).