How to enable SSH access to your ESXi server

Here’s to all the articles I’ve implicitly stated “enable SSH access” or “SSH should be enabled” but offered no further assistance for those who wanted to know how to do that. Now I can link to this post! xD

Enabling SSH access to your ESXi server can be done in the vSphere application or the WebUI for your host. I’ll show you how to do both, since VMware wants to transition us to the WebUI and deprecate the vSphere client.

vSphere Client:

After logging in, proceed to the “Configuration” tab.

Scroll down and click “Security Profile” on the left-hand side, under the “Software” header.

In the upper right corner of the Security Profile page, click on “Properties…”

Find SSH in the list and click on “Options…”

Here you have a few options.

You can change the startup policy if you wish, or otherwise just hit the “Start” button. The latter will enable SSH for the duration, until you disable it or the host reboots.

As you can see, the “Summary” page of my vSphere client is notifying me that SSH is enabled.

WebUI:

After logging in, proceed to the “Manage” link on the left-hand side.

Click on the “Services” tab

Select TSM-SSH in the list and proceed to the “Actions” menu

Similarly to the vSphere client, you can opt to start the SSH service for the duration, or alternatively select a startup policy.

Console

If for some reason you’ve lost network access to your host but still need to SSH into it? Or otherwise find it more simple or easier to log into the console than any sort of interface — you can also do this in the console under the Troubleshooting Options menu.

Thank you for reading. I hope this helps you!