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I already wrote a blog post how you can enable SSH on VMware ESXi 5.0 and VMware ESXi 4.1. As before enabling SSH on VMware ESXi 5.1 or VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 is pretty easy.
The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.
One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.
After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better 
. I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).
Keyfeatures
In the first post I wrote how you can enable SSH on the ESXi 5.0 host. In this post I show you how you can enable or activate SSH on the ESXi 5.0 hosts via the vSphere Client.
As in VMware ESXi 4.1 you can enable or activate SSH on VMware ESXi 5.0 very simple. VMware ESXi 5.0 is also known as VMware vSphere Hypervisor.
This is small guide which allows you to create Remote Powershell Sessions (like SSH). It allows you to create connection to Host which have Powershell Version 2.
Run Powershell 2.0 on the Remotehost and run the following Cmdlet.
Enable-PSRemoting
This command starts the WinRM service if it’s not allready started and sets the startup type to automatic. Adds firewall exceptions for WS-Management communications and creates a listener to accept requests.
On the Local Computer run Powershell and run the following Cmdlet. This allows you to connect to any host. It also starts WinRM if its not already started.
Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts *
After that you may have to restart the WinRM service
Restart-Service winrm -Force
There are two ways to create a new PS Remotesession.
New-PSSession -ComputerName Server01
With Get-PSSession you can list all active sessions. Now you can enter a active Session with Enter-PSSession and the ID
Enter-PSSession 2
A quicker way to do that, you can simply use Enter-PSSession to create a new Session and directly connect to this Session.
Enter-PSSession -ComputerName Server02
To leave a Powershell Remotesession you can simply use the Exit-PSSession
Exit-PSSession
To close a Powershell Remotesession you can list all active Sessions with Get-PSSessions and close them with Remove-PSSession.
Get-PSSession | Remove-PSSession
To run a command on a Remotehost you can use the -ComputerName parameter.
Get-Service -ComputerName Server02
Get-Service -ComputerName Server02 | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "BITS"}
With this little snippet you can run commands on multiple Hosts
$Servers = @("Server01", "Server02")
foreach ($Server in $Servers) {
Write-Host "Server: " $server
Get-Service -ComputerName $server | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "BITS"}
}
Some months ago I wrote a post about how to activate SSH on a ESXi 4.1 via console. But you can also activate SSH with the vSphere Client.
Click on Properties
In VMware ESXi 4.0 you needed a small a trick to activated SSH on your Host. In VMware ESXi 4.1 its very easy to activate SSH.
Navigate to Troubleshooting Options
And by the way, installing ESXi in VMware Fusion on my Mac is really awesome for presentation and testing.
Here is a link how you do this with VMware ESXi 4.0