So I had just built a ESXi 5 VM when I wanted to upload some ISO’s into a datastore, alas SSH is turned off by default in ESXI 5

So, first part is to turn it on, you need to be physically at your ESXi box in order to do this part.

At the ESXi console screen

Logon using the root account

Select “Troubleshooting Options” from the menu

In the next menu, select “Enable SSH”, you will notice that it says ‘Disabled’ in the right hand pane

Press enter to change to enable

Thats it!, you can now quit out of there and go onto the next part which is to get the SFTP server running, truth is it is missing by default in ESXi 4

So lets get it

ssh into your esxi box using the root account.

cd /sbin */ Changes to the right directory
wget http://thebsdbox.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/sftp-server.tar.gz */ Downloads sftp-server files
tar xzvf sftp-server.tar.gz */ Extracts file into current directory /sbin
rm sftp-server.tar.gz */ Removes file now that we have extracted it

Log out.. Thats it! You should now be able to SFTP files to and from your ESXi 5 host!