VMware’s ESXi offers a lightweight, powerful and securely tightened hypervisor which quite frankly comes from the school of “It just works”. However there are times when you need quick access to the console rather than firing up an iLO session to simply SCP a file from one DC to another at host level.

Anyway, whatever the reason here’s how to get PuTTY access to an ESXi host and enable SCP.

At the ESXi console (local or via iLo) perform the following:

• Press ALT + F1, (the screen will clear)
• Type “unsupported” and press ENTER (without the quotes), note – the text will not locally echo
• Provide the ‘root‘ password and press ENTER
• cd /etc and press ENTER
• Use ‘vi‘ to edit inetd.conf
• Remove the ‘#” from the beginning of the SSH lines
• Save and quit
• Type services.sh restart and press ENTER
• Type? ps aux | grep inetd to get the Process ID
• Type kill -HUP Process ID

Done.

Remember to edit the /etc/inetd.conf file after you’ve finished to return it to the default state.