VMware: licensed ESXi hosts without SSH
Backups, restores and instant recovery of VMware VMs no longer need SSH on licensed ESXi hosts: every change on the host — snapshots, disk copies, creating and registering VMs, power operations, the NFS datastore of instant recovery — goes through the vSphere API.
- Automatic (default): licensed hosts use the vSphere API; hosts with the free license, whose API is read-only, keep using SSH as before. A host that gets a license later switches by itself.
- Agents → VMware ESXi hosts shows the method of each host and can force Always SSH or Always vSphere API (also when adding a host); the choice is checked at once.
- Restores through the API upload each disk as a sparse VMDK built straight from the backup (only blocks with data) and convert it to a thin disk on the host.
- Existing hosts, jobs and backups keep working; restore points do not depend on the method.
Tested on a licensed ESXi 8.0.3: a running VM backed up application-consistent, restored as a new VM, all blocks identical.
The user guide (VMware ESXi) is updated in all 14 languages.
Update the console and then the agents (Agents → Update all).
Releases are signed with the BackupZit release key; consoles verify them before installing.
