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
