This comes again from the Fusion team, but applies to ESX as well. Go Fusion Team Go! The main way is via VMware Toolbox. You’ll need Tools installed, of course, and the way you get to it depends on the guest OS you’re running. In Windows, right-click the VMware-three-boxes logo in the system tray and[…]
My new best friend? You can’t tell me who my friends are! That is not allowed! Who is this rCLI fellow and how dare you make such a claim! Well, the rCLI, better known as “VMware Infrastructure Remote CLI” The VMware Infrastructure Remote CLI provides a command-line interface for datacenter management from a remote server.[…]
Really, I assure you, it will be very anticlimactic.
Well now. We’ve come a long way since parts 1 & 2 haven’t we? That is all well and good considering, and makes for some light background reading. However, the game changes with ESXi, as there is no “Supported” Service Console on it’s platform.
In reality, the vmkernel runs a busybox executable. (Busybox is a linux in an executable binary sort of thing), and you can enable DropBear SSH, and the like on it. Doing this however, will likely void your warranty or support agreement, or prevent you from getting your per incident support taken care of, so I strongly recommend against it.
With that said then. How does ESXi handle all of the communication we talked about before, how do you make it redundant, and how do you interact with ESXi in a meaningful way? Let’s take a look at the first two, the last will be covered in a future post.