Questions[host](server)

Is it possible on the client side to setup the client.conf file to resolve a particular host/domain to a given IP.

For instance, domain.tld resolve usually from the Internet NS to 1.2.3.4

host domain.tld => 1.2.3.4

I would like to force domain.tld to resolve to 10.11.12.13 when using openvpn client.conf

openvpn client.conf
host domain.tld => 10.11.12.13

I'd like to add a CustomLog directive to my apache configuration to log the full URL requested (or at least the host portion of the URL). I have several domains being handled by the same instance of apache, and would like to be able to distinguish the domains in the logs (as now all I see is "GET /"). I see in the documentation on LogFormat it lists %U to print the path portion of the URL, but I'm looking for the host.

Let's say I just have an ip address for a server and I don't have a domain with it (it's just a database server, so it doesn't need a domain). I don't want to have to remember the ip address every time, so is there a way I could still use the syntax like ssh username@database or something?

I have a free domain running at x10hosting (x10.bz), and I want to find out the IP Address of my MySQL host for it, so I can contact the MySQL database from another host. I've already added that host to the access list, but now I need to find out the IP Address of the MySQL host. How can I find this out? x10 is using cPanel X and PHPMyAdmin.

I've been using VMWare for many years, running dozens of production servers with very few issues. But I never tried hosting more than 20 VMs on a single physical host. Here is the idea:

1. A stripped down version of Windows XP can live with 512MB of RAM and 4GB disk space.
2. $5,000 gets me an 8-core server class machine with 64GB of RAM and four SAS mirrors.
3. Since 100 above mentioned VMs fit into this server, my hardware cost is only $50 per VM which is super nice (cheaper than renting VMs at GoDaddy or any other hosting shops).

I'd like to see if anybody is able to achieve this kind of scalability with VMWare? I've done a few tests and bumped into a weird issue. The VM performance starts degrading dramatically once you start up 20 VMs. At the same time, the host server does not show any resource bottlenecks (the disks are 99% idle, CPU utlization is under 15% and there is plenty of free RAM).

I'll appreciate if you can share your success stories around scaling VMWare or any other virtualization technology!