Switching the vCenter Appliance Shells

This is a short post on switching the vCenter Appliance Shells.

The vCSA is bundled with two different supported shells -

• Appliance Shell (default)

• BASH shell

The Appliance shell is the default shell. Once you log in to the vCSA, it will present you with the below well known screen.

The appliance shell can be used to update the VCSA, using the software-packages command and has some other use cases as well.

Switching the vCenter Server Appliance 6.x to BASH Shell

1. Log in to the VCSA through SSH.

2. Run this command to enable access the Bash shell shell.set --enabled true

3. Type shell and press Enter.

4. In the temporary BASH shell, run this command to permanently configure the default Shell to BASH for Root chsh -s /bin/bash root

5. For the changes to take effect, Log out from the BASH Shell and login again.

If you are using VCSA 6.7 please follow the below steps.

1. Log in to the VCSA through SSH.

2. Type shell and press Enter.

3. In the temporary BASH shell, run this command to permanently configure the default Shell to BASH for Root chsh -s /bin/bash root

4. For the changes to take effect, Log out from the BASH Shell and login again.

Switching the vCenter Server Appliance 6.x to Appliance Shell

1. Log in to the VCSA through SSH.

2. Run this command to change from using the BASH Shell to the Appliance Shell: chsh -s /bin/appliancesh root

3. For the changes to take effect, Log out from the Appliance Shell and login again.

If you need to temporarily switch to the Appliance shell, you can simply run a below command

appliancesh

With this, let's wrap up this post.

Thank you for reading !

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