SSH Access to ESXi 5

If you like me need the oppotunity to use SSH once and a while, in your ESX envoirment, then you might wanna take a look at this post.

First let it be saif that, when you ENABLE SSH access, your host shows a yellow exclamation inside your vCenter, don’t worry, thats normal and it clears, once you disable SSH access again (which of coarse you do)

Well to ENABLE, follow the steps below:

Enabling ESXi Shell access with the vSphere Client

Use the vSphere Client to enable local and remote access to the ESXi Shell:

1. Log in to a vCenter Server system using the vSphere Client.
2. Select the host in the inventory panel.
3. Click the Configuration tab and click Security Profile.
4. In the Services section, click Properties.
5. Select ESXi Shell from this list:

   ESXi Shell
   SSH
   Direct Console UI

6. Click Options and select Start and stop manually.

   Note: When you select Start and stop manually, the service does not start when you reboot the host. If you want the service to start when you reboot the host, select Start and stop with host.

7. Select Start to enable the service.
8. Click OK

The info above comes from vmware, and you can read the entire post here, also you can see how-to enable SSH without vSphare Client.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=2004746