So a little while ago I was playing around with building a virtual environment using Windows 2008 Hyper-V and while this was an interesting experience I found Microsoft's lack of any Linux distro support beyond the SUSE to be a bit of a pain.  That being said I wanted to increase the resources available on my Dell PowerEdge server and thought I would take this opportunity to rebuld it before I get started on building out a SharePoint 2010 beta 2 testing farm....whew, try saying that 10 times fast :)

I downloaded and installed the new VMWare ESXi 4.  It looks like they are really streamlining this technology with the vSphere platform...blah blah blah means they are the same product with license key feature unlocks (from what I understand of it anyways).  Not surprisingly this was a lightning fast install.  I did have a couple of hiccups trying to figure out a) where to put my free license key in and b) getting SSH enabled.

License Key - like most normal people I thought that after installing the vsphere client onto my desktop that there would be a little section in the help menu for adding license keys (like most software).  Turns out you need to click on the host, then the configuration tab and then the Licensed Features option under Software. (OK ... umm forgot to mention...click the edit button on the right hand side!!)

esxfeatures

SSH - enabling this took some digging.  Not much mind you because there are actual quite a few people out there writing about the same thing...  here are a couple that I found:

I don't want to rehash it but here are the steps (in case they take down their postings!)

  1. At the ESXi console ALT+F1 for new session at the console screen
  2. enter the command "unsupported" and type your password
  3. use vi to edit the inetd.conf file so type...vi /etc/inetd.conf
  4. scroll to the areas where ssh is listed and remove the # sign (delete key works!)
  5. type :wq to exit vi and save your changes
  6. restart the server OR do the killing of the process number for inetd and using the correct switches (i just rebooted because I dont care that much :)

And after the machine comes back up you should be able to connect via Putty or whatever tool you are using no problem.

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