Some of the container restart issues related to Links were resolved in 1.4+ & 1.5 releases. Please refer to the thread https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/6350.

Also, the network model is being revamped via https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9983 to provide a more flexible plugins based Networking system which can also provide multi-host solution that is more powerful than the existing single-host multi-container linking system.

Very good question, sorry I don't have a good enough answer for that right now. I only needed this setup for testing and not really a production environment, so data persistence wasn't a requirement.

Once I have a satisfactory approach, I'll post a solution.

You can use an ambassador such as listed here [0].

[0] https://docs.docker.com/articles/ambassador_pattern_linking/