For 3.5 follow these instructions.
You must be at the console of the server for this.
Hold down ALT and push F1.
Just type in the word ‘unsupported’, without the quotations of course, and hit enter.
You may see a warning about it being unsupported.
type in the root password that was set up when ESXi was installed and hit enter.
You will be at the prompt.
Type vi /etc/inetd.conf and hit enter. This will bring up the configuration file.
Look for where is shows #ssh and remove the # by placing the cursor in front of it and hitting the ‘i’ key. Then hit the backspace key.
Hit ESC and then type in :wq then hit enter.
That saves it and drops you back to the prompt.
Run this command: /sbin/services.sh restart
That should restart the managment services and start up SSH but not cause any issues with any currently running VMs.
Use whatever ssh client software to try and connect to it.
For 3.5u2 and above including 4.0 follow these instructions.
You must be at the console of the server for this.
Hold down ALT and push F1.
Just type in the word ‘unsupported’, without the quotations of course, and hit enter.
You may see a warning about it being unsupported.
type in the root password that was set up when ESXi was installed and hit enter.
You will be at the prompt.
Type vi /etc/inetd.conf and hit enter. This will bring up the configuration file.
Look for where is shows #ssh and remove the # by placing the cursor in front of it and hitting the ‘i’ key. Then hit the backspace key.
Hit ESC and then type in :wq then hit enter.
That saves it and drops you back to the prompt.
Type ‘ps aux|grep inetd’ and hit enter.
Make a note of the PID(number) that shows up for inetd.
Type in ‘kill -HUP PIDNumber’ with of course the PIDNumber being that number you saw from the previous command. This will restart the inetd process but should not cause any issues with the currently running VMs.
Use whatever ssh client software to try and connect to it. It should work just fine now.
Note: For copying files it only supports SCP, not SFTP. That is because it uses Dropbear for the SSH server instead of OpenSSH.
Below is a site I used for help on this:
http://chall32.blogspot.com/2009/10/vmware-esxi-ssh-sftp-access.html