Posted on December 23, 2008 - by martin

Enable SSH on ESXi

Your installation of ESXi is done and you probably wanted to connect to your new server with SSH … too bad.

SSH isn’t supported out of the box and there isn’t a button to click on to simply enable it.
But there’s a nick hack to get this working, just follow the following steps:

1. On your ESXi console screen press Alt+F1
    
2. Allthough no command prompt appears, just type unsupported (all lower case letters)
    
3. Enter your root password, you now have found the commandprompt
4. type ‘ vi /etc/inetd.conf ‘
5. Scroll down until you see the line that start with ” #ssh ” you can search the contents by pressing ” / “
6. Move your cursor on the ” # ” and press ” x “
7. save your file by pressing ” :wq! “
8. restart the management service ” /sbinservices.sh restart “

This should be it, now you should be able to ssh to your ESXi server

But … if this isn’t the case you could also try to stop your inetd process, before you reboot your server.

1. ps -a | grep inetd
2. kill <pid>
3. inetd

That should be it !