Sophos Esxi

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Administering your VMware environment often requires remote access to your ESXi hosts. Access to the ESXi shell via SSH offers administrators the ability to maintain, troubleshoot, and remediate issues by using a Secure Shell client such as PuTTY. For security purposes, SSH is disabled by default. However, you can enable it for remote command execution in multiple ways. In this post, we will go through the different processes of enabling SSH on VMware ESXi 6.5 hosts.

  • Direct Console User Interface (DCUI)
  • vSphere Web Client – Host
  • vSphere Web Client – vCenter

ESXi uses the concept of vSwitches which act as the link from physical network cards to the virtual machine's virtual network cards. Starting with a ESXi Host machine with two network cards, you'd create a second vSwitch as the WAN or Internet interface, assigning the second network port to the vSwitch.

  • To begin, download the Sophos for Virtual Environments executable from Sophos Central. Run the SVEESXicsfx.exe from a machine in your environment. Read and Accept the Sophos EULA. Select the destination for the installer and Install.
  • I'm running 2 Sophos VMs in HA on separate ESXi hosts, each host only has one physical NIC and I do everything with VLANs. My modem plugs into my switch and whichever VM is the current primary will use it.

Enable SSH | DCUI

Remote console to the DCUI screen of the ESXi host.

At the DCUI screen, press F2 to log in.

From the System Customization screen, select Troubleshooting Options.

Under Troubleshooting Mode Options, choose Enable SSH.

SSH will now show Enabled.

Press ESC to back out to the main DCUI screen.

Enable SSH | vSphere Web Client – Host

Log into the ESXi host via the Web Client.

From the home page, select Host and navigate to the Actions gear. From the Actions menu select Services, and choose Enable Secure Shell.

Additionally, SSH can also be enabled from the Services tab under Manage. Simply select SSH and Start from the Actions gear.

Enable SSH | vSphere Web Client – vCenter

Sophos Utm Esxi Setup

Log into the vCenter instance via the web client.

Sophos utm esxi setup

Select the pertinent host, navigate to the Configure tab. Scroll down to the System section, and select Security Profile.

Scroll down to the Services section and click Edit.

Sophos Xg Esxi Download

Locate the SSH service and select Start.

You can now access your ESXi host remotely via a Secure Shell client. Lastly, it is always wise to Stop/Disable SSH once you are done.

VMware Documentation