I get a lot of questions about ESXi and SSH. Most people manage to connect to their ESXi but don’t know what to do next because there’s no actual Service Console there. Well the answer is short and simple: vim-cmd.
A couple examples of stuff you can do with vim-cmd:
enter maintenance mode: vim-cmd /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
List all registered vm’s: vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms
Install VMware Tools for VM with ID: vim-cmd /vmsvc/tools.install [vmid]
Power on a specific VM: vim-cmd /vmsvc/power.on [vmid]
So check out the link above and start trying out this poweful command
benjamin says
Does ESxi take vim-cmd? ESX 3.5 takes only vmware-vim-cmd.
Duncan says
yeah it’s vim-cmd on ESXi.
bobbydamercer says
Link seems to be dead.
bobbydamercer says
Link seems to be dead.
Care to share the link?
Duncan Epping says
I can’t fix the link, it is gone… but it is an article from 2008 so I am hoping by now you are running a newer version of ESXi right and just use esxcli