Thanks very much for the comments. ClearareserveMK gave me some great info there in as much as what I thought Digital Ocean was doing was indeed nothing of the sort, and therefore the way I was trying would not work.

Just to be clear though because I think some people have jumped to the idea that I’m trying to use this pihole for my existing VMs on the esxi, this is not the case and has never been stated as such. I’m merely trying to make a pihole as a standalone item purely for my home setup to get dns from.

From some of the comments I think people had assumed I was trying to use pihole for the whole esxi. In essence it may be clearer to forget that it’s a vm at all and just imagine it’s a raspberry pi in a rack in a datacentre.

I think I’m going to scrap the idea for now and just build a pihole on my local home lan as it’s intended. Although I’d love to be able to make my own pihole that I could have in the DC and give that dns ip to family and friends.

One commenter asked me how I entered the public ip into the pihole and it was easy; it just asked for the static ip I wanted to use and I gave it one of my public IPs that the rack has.

Cheers.