Launching the virtual machine

We will use VirtualBox for hosting the virtual machine, but you are free to use any other virtualization platform, such as VMware Workstation and Hyper-V: 

1. After launching VirtualBox, we have to create a new virtual machine for pfSense by clicking on the Machines menu and then New:

2. The Create Virtual Machine wizard will launch, which will walk you through the process of creating and launching a new virtual machine. The creation is rather straightforward, with default choices. 
3. Enter the desired Name of the VM, select BSD from the Type drop-down menu, and select FreeBSD(64-bit) from the Version drop-down menu.
4. Select the desired RAM for your VM. The recommended size is 512 MB but it will run smoothly at 256 MB if you are running low on RAM.
5. Also further into the steps you can select the size of the virtual hard disk. We recommend at least 4 GB in size but the minimum requirement is 1 GB if you are running low on disk space. The click Create.

This will successfully create a virtual machine for you. Now, we are left with configuring and completing the installation.