Share IP between NIC and VM?

Question

VMware

We have one public IP. Now the task has become to raise several VMs on vmware ESXi. Moreover, one of the VMs needs to be assigned a public IP address.
L1: the cable comes from the provider and that's it. This cable should go straight to ESXi.

What is the correct way to “forward” an IP address to a guest VM?

Answer 1

I have done the following:

On VM Front - NAT is up and all other virtual machines from the VM Backend network go through it.
At the same time, two interfaces are raised on the ESXi host itself.

Answer 2

Raise your IP address on the virtual machine, then NAT on it and connect to other VMs and ESXi via NAT (if a virtual machine with an external IP address falls, then you can’t reach ESXi remotely, unless, of course, ESXi has other network interfaces)

Answer 3

There may be another way, described here.