Tunneling vSphere Client in Windows

Using tunneling over SSH you can forward the multiple ports needed to access the vSphere client used to administrate ESX or ESXi hosts.

Requirements:

• SSH jumpbox (from this jumpbox you should have access to the ESX/ESXi machine)
• PuTTY or Cygwin

So basically we are binding the following ports: 443, 902, and 903 to our localhost using PuTTy in this tutorial.

Steps:

1. Open up PuTTy and configure the settings to look as follows where destIP=your destination IP address of the ESX box

Go back to the session tab and type the hostname/IP address of your SSH jumpbox. Alternatively you could open up cygwin and type the following: ssh -L 443:destIP:443 -L 902:destIP:902 -L 903:destIP:903 user@jumpboxIP
2. Edit the hosts file in windows C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (this is required as esxi relies on dns name and uses local resolution).
   
   Add the entry:
   127.0.0.1    ESXiHostname
   
3. Open up vSphere client and login with the hostname of the remote ESX box

Common Errors:
Unable to connect to the MKS: Failed to connect to server :902

Occurs if you are not properly forwarding port 902 903

Patching ESXi single host

For ESXi 4.0 and below, patching can be done with vSphere Host Update Utility.

For ESXi 4.1, vSphere Host Update Utility is no longer supported. Patch using command line:

1) Download patch bundles from VMware's support website: www.vmware.com/patch/download/

2) Upload the patch bundles to your datastore. (You can use vSphere client to do this.)

3) Put the ESXi host into maintenance mode.

4) SSH into the ESXi box. This blog shows how to enable SSH on ESXi 4.1.

5) CD to the datastore and use esxupdate --bundle to patch ESXi:
cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore0/patches
esxupdate --bundle ./ESXi410-201011001.zip update