2009 May 24 - Sun
Enable SSH on VMWare ESXi
VMMWare ESXi is installed and started with SSH disabled. To enable it is an unsupported
option, as it allows a user access to the console, operating system and associated file
system.
My primary reason for accessing the VMWare ESXi file system (vmfs), is the ease in which
one can get ISO images on to the system. When running the VMWare Infrastructure Client,
during the creation of a virtual machine, the virtual CD Drive can be attached to an ISO
image resident in the DataStore, with the DataStore basially being the vmfs file system.
So to get read/write access to vmfs, one needs to activate SSH on VMWare:
- At the console of ESXi host, press Alt-F1 to access bypass the simple management
window and gain access to the console window.
- There is no prompt and no text echo, but type unsupported and hit
the enter key.
- Enter the password you've assigned for root.
- A prompt of ~ # will become visible.
- Use vi to edit /etc/inetd.conf.
- Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #, and save the file.
- Use ps | grep inetd to find the existing inetd process id.
- Restart the process with kill -HUP id.
- You will now have access via SSH.
After logging in, the default datastore can be found at /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1. I
created a sub-directory there named ISO to hold my ISO images. The directory and files are
accessible from the VMWare Infrastructure Client when creating a new Virtual Machine. ISO
files can be retrieved with the wget command.
I havn't done it yet, but one could add a .ssh directory on /root, do the appropriate
magic (covered in another article), and login with an ssh key rather than root password.
Much of the information here was extracted from a couple of web sites, with
VM-Help
being the primary one. It's forum entries have additional useful information.
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