Back to Basics- Part 16 Understanding VMware vSphere ESXi Shell and SSH Timeouts

In our last blog posts related to Back to Basics Series we discussed about Virtual Machine Files (Part1), Standard Switches (Part2), vCenter Server (Part 3),Templates (Part4) vApp (Part 5), Migration (Part 6),Cloning (Part 7), Host Profiles (Part 8), Virtual Volumes AKA VVOL's (Part 9) Fault Tolerance (Part10) ,Distributed Switches (Part 11) and Distributed Resource Scheduler Part 12, vCenter Server High Availability (Part 13) ,Back to Basics (Part -14) Creating Reports in VROPS and 

Back to Basics- Part 15 Understanding VMware App Volumes

we also discussed about the various tasks related to building Home Lab Part1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4 Part 5.

Dedicated this article to talk about Shell and SSH Availability and Idle timeout values available to configure using VMware vSphere web client and DCUI and how these values are different from one another.

Availability timeout values talks about how long the SSH and ESXi shell remains enabled, the default value for both SSH and ESXi Shell is 0 means both SSH and Shell remains enabled until Disabled Manually, however any value i.e 1 or Higher Indicates how many seconds in web client and how many minutes in DCUI the service remains enabled before being automatically disabled.

Idle timeout settings talks about the local and remote user connections wherein they get automatically logged out if their session remains idle for the defined time period, the default value for Idle timeout remains 0 which means users are not automatically logged out, however any value i.e 1 or higher indicates how and idle session remains active before being automatically logged out, If the idle timeout value is configured through DCUI it's measured in Minutes otherwise seconds when configured through web client.

Note : Point worth noticing here is the difference in the values i.e minutes from DCUI and seconds from web client one should not get confused about the same.