Howto Enable SSH in VMWARE ESXi 4.0

Today I was in need to execute some scripts on ESXi 4.0 server via remote to power ON the VM guest machine , but there is no menu to enable ssh  in ver 4.0, so I followed below steps to enable ssh on esxi 4.0
Free version of ESXi do have ssh service available but its disabled by default.

Goto your ESXI server, At the console , press ALT-F1 ,

Type unsupported in the console and then press Enter. The text typed will not be show over the screen, so be careful while typing ,  If you typed in unsupported correctly, you will see the password prompt.
Now Enter the password for the root login.

# You should then see the prompt of ~ #
Now we need to Edit the file inetd.conf in order to enable ssh service, Open it in vi editor

vi /etc/inetd.conf

Find the lines that begins with #ssh and remove the #
Then save the file.
by pressing ESC and type in :wq  ,

Once you’ve closed the vi editor, you can either restart the esxi server
OR
Restart the inetd process only by following steps.

To restart inetd run , we first need to find the pid of inetd process by following command

ps | grep inetd

The output of the above ps command will be something like

4886     4886     busybox          inetd

the process ID in this example is 4886. Now run

kill -HUP 4866 

Now try to login to your ESXI 4.0 via putty or any other ssh client, Hopefully It will work fine 🙂

Good thing about new ESXI 4.1 version is that it supported enabling SSH via main console, no need to go back to black screen, i mean cli.

http://www.ceyhunkirmizitas.net/vmware/tech-support-mode-has-been-disabled-by-the-administrator-on-esxi-4-1/
http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1X29hOviBs

Regard’s
Syed Jahanzaib