Access a command prompt in VMware ESXi

I can’t tell you the reason you may need to access a command prompt on VMware ESXi, but I can tell you that I had issues with a vm and needed to manually delete it from disk.  This process couldn’t be done for me from the VI Client, so I did so through the command line.

To access the command line in ESXi:

1. press ALT + F1 at the main screen.
2. Then type “unsupported” without the quotes to gain access to your command prompt.
3. When prompted for the password, use the root password you created when setting up your server.

The volumes are stored under /vmfs/volumes/datastore(x): where x is a number