Enable SSH For ESXi

A great article on how to enable SSH for ESXi, which if you didn’t already know does not have a Service Console to speak of, but is built on the BusyBox distribution. However, it is still possible to remote manage it using SSH with a tweak here and there.

Here’s the great video that shows you how to do it step by step, but check out the rest of the article for more detail:

Enable SSH For ESXi

Paul Shannon posted at 2008-7-17 Category: ESX, VMware, Virtualisation

7 Responses Leave a comment

  1. #1Norbert Kiesel @ 2008-7-31 22:00 Reply

    Actually busybox is not a distribution, but a program that combines many different standard Unix binaries into one binary. In order to run e.g. “ls” using busybox, you have to create a symbolic link named “ls” to the busybox binary and then exeute that. busybox is used in many embedded systems because of it’s small size.

    So ESX3i still contains a service console, just that it’s no longer based on RedHat but either on one of the mini-distributions like DSL or one that VMware created on their own.

  2. #2Gil K @ 2008-11-9 15:49 Reply

    Nice to see that some one made a video .:)

  3. #3Jack @ 2009-1-15 20:03 Reply

    Tried to do this but system hangs with boot=2 Not much documentation on this.

  4. #4Techfreakz @ 2009-1-16 21:12 Reply

    Given the way in which ESXi is held together under busybox, it’s be nice to compile some other binaries for use. For my application, being able to integrate the NUT UPS software would make life so much easier…….

  5. #5zaid.khalid @ 2009-2-25 12:42 Reply

    Excellent and well defined information

  6. #6gandalf @ 2010-9-15 13:05 Reply

    What tool did you use to make the Video?

  7. #7Shawn Harry @ 2010-10-19 10:31 Reply

    @gandalf Its just a .gif file.

Leave a Reply

(Ctrl + Enter)