Go to the local ESXi console and press ‘Alt+F1′
Then type: unsupported (NOTE: the words won’t appear)
Enter your root password.
You will be greeted by this message:

You have activated Tech Support Mode.
The time and date of this activation have been sent to the system logs.

Tech Support Mode is not supported unless used in consultation
with VMware Tech Support.

At the prompt type:

vi /etc/inetd.conf



Look for the line that is commented out with ‘#ssh’.
Press Delete to remove the ‘#’.
Save the ‘inetd.conf’ by typing:

:wq!

Now you can either restart the ESXi server or to avoid downtime do the following.
In the console type:

ps | grep inetd

The output should look like:

4297 4297 busybox inetd

Your process id is 4297.
Now type:

kill -HUP 4297

Alt+F2 gets you back to the main management screen.