How to enable SSH on VMware ESX 3.5?

When VMware ESX 3.5 is installed on fresh machine then it was observed that by default SSH is not active or machine is inaccessible using SSH protocol.

I understand that VMware ESX 3.5 is older release of VMware ESX, however, below steps someone might find useful to solve this issue.

After logging into VMware ESX 3.5 box as root, execute following commands to enable sshClient and sshServer services inside ESX firewall.

 [root@esx35 root]# esxcfg-firewall  -s
Known services: activeDirectorKerberos caARCserve CIMHttpServer CIMHttpsServer CIMSLP commvaultDynamic commvaultStatic ftpClient ftpServer kerberos LDAP LDAPS legatoNetWorker LicenseClient nfsClient nisClient ntpClient smbClient snmpd sshClient sshServer swISCSIClient symantecBackupExec symantecNetBackup telnetClient TSM updateManager VCB vncServer vpxHeartbeats

[root@esx35 root]# esxcfg-firewall --enableService sshClient
[root@esx35 root]# esxcfg-firewall --enableService  sshServer

Also ‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’ file should have ‘PermitRootLogin’ set to yes if someone wants to have remote SSH access for root account.

[root@esx35 root]# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | grep -i Root
PermitRootLogin yes
[root@esx35 root]# /etc/init.d/sshd restart

This should allow root user to access VMware ESX box remotely using SSH.