As the title says: I'm hoping to find some tips for setting up a Windows Server 2012 R2 system (which happens to be a VM) as a software gateway - that is to say, essentially a switch which routes traffic between one network segment and another - without having to configure it as a NAT. On one side of this gateway would be my entire home network - a couple desktops and laptops, as well as a server with a couple VMs - and on the other, nothing but my ISP-provided router / modem.
A little background to make the goal clearer: I live in a rural area with awful options for broadband. My only two real options are satellite and Verizon LTE (what used to be called "Home Fusion"). The latter is what I have, and it's basically a 4G cell phone bolted to the side of my house. I have a 20GB / mo bandwidth limit, and overage fees are exorbitant. I also have limited options for configuring the provided hardware - I can't disable the NAT on the antenna / router, and they do not offer SNMP so I can't directly monitor our total utilization. So, the goal is to route all traffic for the house through a WS2012R2 VM, so that I can monitor and, ideally, throttle / block traffic as needed to prevent overage fees.
What I'm looking for is a Windows service that will act as a gateway/switch - passing network connections between a network adapter on the home LAN network and another on the WAN / internet side of the network, butwithout performing address translation. So the full chain would beVZW Antenna <=> VZW Router <=> Server NIC1 <=> WAN virtual switch <=> gateway server <=> LAN virtual switch <=> All other VMs / Server NIC 2 <=> All physical devices. In that chain, all devices on both sides of the gateway server will have addresses in the same subnet (192.168.1.x). My hope is that I can use this model to route all traffic through the gateway server without ending up with a double NAT.
The question is, how do I configure that gateway server to route traffic between the two NICs without installing the NAT feature of the [Routing and] Remote Access role? Is it possible?
Huge thanks in advance for any suggestions!
JM