If you need to get a view on authentication attemps on an ESXi and to order by IP address and attemps counts:

1grep -Eo "Connection from [^ ]* " $(ls -rt /var/log/auth.*) | awk '{print $NF}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

And you will get something like:

1156 172.16.25.23
216 172.16.25.32
31 172.16.52.2

For testing cases it could be very useful to host a nested (= virtualized) VMware ESXi on your desk or laptop machine. For my own needs, I had to install an ESXi on virtualbox. Here is my tutorial.

Installation

Prerequisites

In order to install an ESXi 5.5 you'll have to provide:

• 64-bit x86 processor with at least 2 …