And I agree that brain is the best place, although I could tell you a story. I created a new account at the new bank, because they had a super high interest rate. I was assigned a temporary customer id and password, which I had to (both) change immediately after logging in to my internet banking account. So I picked a crazy paranoid password and id and saved it to my brain. Week after, my debit card arrived via snail mail with instructions to activate it in IB.

But I forgot the password. So I called the hotline, where they asked for my customer id, which I forgot too

It’s certainly arguable, but I think it’s still better to write down a password on an offline media (which would require physical theft) than to choose a simple password, as simple passwords could be hacked by literally anyone out there, whereas your offline notes can only be accessed by a rather tiny group of people (if at all).

But we do agree on the fact that the brain is the best place to store a password

1. They forget it, restore it and change it to something simple
2. They write it down somewhere

So I think that a better approach is to use whole sentences as passwords. Even simple sentences like “My wife’s name is ..” are immune to dictionary attacks, bruteforce attacks and rainbow tables.

I’m not quite sure if I understand what you’re planning to do. Why would you install anything on the hypervisor itself? That’s actually (officially) not possible with ESXi (the free version), and probably not what you want, anyway. Consider the hypervisor as a kind of “big” BIOS. It allows you to connect your VI Client (the Windows application) to it to create and maintain your VMs, monitor their performance etc.
But it’s not really supposed to do anything more than that.

You would probably want to create and setup the Gateway VM first, and connect it to vSwitch0 (connected to the physical public NIC) and vSwitch1 (virtual connection to all other VMs). And then you can put any number of VMs on that box, and only connect them to vSwitch1, hence making them accessible only via your Gateway VM.
You can connect vSwitch1 to a second physical NIC, which faces your local offices network, as well, if you want to. In that case, the Gateway VM would be the only connection for the other VMs _and_ your office network to “world”. Is that what you are planning to do?

Cheers
Carsten

I’m using ESXi 3.5 u4 on HP Proliant ML110 G5.And I need to setup a small experimental VM setup in the way similar to yours with the Gateway VM ( ie your VM1 ) acting as a reverse proxy.

In my test setup I want the Gateway VM to be accessible from hypervisor via dbclient ( dropbear’s lightweight ssh client ). To be more clear the Gateway VM has two NICs ( one public facing & one internal facing ). Now the I want the internal facing IP range to be visilble from hypervisor. Is that possible. If you think it can be done can you suggest me way to do it?

And it will be really kind of you if you can enumerate the steps for the experimental setup you mentioned, so that I can follow how to do it?

I tried creating 6 RAID-0 arrays.

The problem i’ve been having is if I eject a hot-swap drive, the RAID0 virtual disk disappears; it doesn’t come back if I plug it
in..

Or plug in a replacement to test “swapping in a replacement drive”.

The only way i’ve found to get the drive back requires a reboot, which is troublesome…

Do you know of a way to make hot swap work like it should? (No rebooting the server)

I did quite a lot of configuration and testing here, but the idea of using MySQL NDB Cluster and GlusterFS over that long distance (one server in the UK, one in the US) failed. It’s too slow, unfortunately. So I would recommend not to try this approach for a Mini-CDN like thing. Actually I am considering to get a second server in the UK — in the same data centre. Then it should work just fine. Stay tuned.