The IT world varies greatly between different IT shops because of individual requirements. Because of this some people need to do things that others may not need to. This led me to the idea of today’s post: how to enable SSH on ESXi hosts and get rid of the annoying warning message.
In most environments – and ones that are security constrained – it would not be acceptable to permanently enable SSH on your vSphere hosts. This would be considered too risky and it opens up an attack point. But for many shops, especially small shops, they are not as concerned and would rather have the ease-of-access factor.
To start off, let’s review one of the ways to enable SSH on a vSphere host. I will show you the common method using the vSphere client.
This will allow the SSH service to run and auto start any time the host is rebooted. You will then be able to do this any time SSH to the host for easier management without needing to turn the service on and off as needed.
Now the results of our enabling SSH on our test host is shown below. We get the yellow nag message at the top of the screen when viewing our host. This is not the end of the world, but if you intend on leaving SSH enabled permanently then you don’t want to look at it.
This may be of value to those that are not concerned about SSH being turned on. If you work on a team that is concerned about this you will not want to make these changes, because the warning message will save you time by noticing that the service was turned on.