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I am in need of the ability to copy files/folders from an ESX 3.0.1 datastore.

Unfortunately, this version does not allow this via the VI client, and as such I have been looking to do this using SSH/SCP.

Firstly, I do not know how to enable root SSH/SCP login. I have created a user who can log in remotely, but when I follow the steps to edit the sshd_config file, it is blank.

This means the root user cannot connect to the host remotely using WinSCP. I have tried to copy the folder using WinSCP as my SSH enabled user, but it does not have permissions to the files in the folder.

Can someone advise how I am to copy the folder I need from this host?

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  • Is the host or datastore v3.0.1?
    – GregL
    Sep 25, 2015 at 18:03
  • Well I was sllightly off the mark, the host is 3.0.2, and the datastore only has a VMFS version, which is VMFS 3.21
    – James Edmonds
    Sep 27, 2015 at 10:30

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I've only ever used esxi 5.0 and 5.5 so not sure if its similar at all but in 5.0 and 5.5 you can log into your host, click the configuration tab for your server, locate security profile, there's a section called services, you can click properties and then enable ssh. Might be under firewall settings too.

From there you should be able to ssh to the server, locate the datastore and the files/folders you need and scp to another server if need be. I'm sure if you enable ssh winscp should work as well. Hope this helps somewhat.

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  • Thanks for your reply. Yes the same principle applies to 3.0, and I have enabled SSH server under security profile. The problem is, by default the root user is no granted SSH access, and I have to use a different user account I created. Again, as the VM folders only have read access for root user, my new user account does not have permission to copy files.
    – James Edmonds
    Sep 27, 2015 at 10:32
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Ok, so I found a solution.

Firstly, I had to follow the steps shown in this video, to enable root SSH access by editing sshd_config.

After restarting the SSH service, I was able to connect using WinSCP and the root user credentials, and commence copying files from the datastore.

Moving these VMs to a 6.0 host should hopefully be simple enough, by using the vSphere client datastore browser.

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