So I've got an interesting problem.
I currently rent a couple of servers from Hetzner (a German hosting provider). Each server has a soft firewall and does something like web hosting / database.
I would like to rent a beefier server and setup a hypervisor like ESXi on it with a vSwitch connected to physical NIC and a pfSense VM, and another vSwitch from the pfSense VM to other VMs. Unfortunately, Hetzner does not appear to provide a hardware firewall in between the public interface and your server (leaving soft firewall as the only option).
What are the security implications of running ESXi (v5.5) out in public like that? Quick research suggested this thread on spiceworks which sums it up as disabling SSH/Console (telnet?) access and setting up proper SSL cert and a very complex unguessable username/password pair. With the obvious implication of single-entry attack point.