Earlier this week, I was in a vSphere 5 ICM class and SSH access was brought up. Most of the students in the class that have used ESX in the past have been quite accustomed to using SSH for various tasks. Our instructor showed us how to enable SSH from the vSphere client. We were then shown the alert that is displayed in the Summary tab when SSH is enabled.

In the Hosts and Clusters view, the host icon also displays an alert on the host.

A classmate asked if this could be disabled. Our instructor looked it up and found a KB Article indicating the alert couldn’t be disabled. I was pretty sure it could be as I thought I had seen a discussion about it a couple of months ago. I then found KB Article 2003637. The KB describes how to disable the annoying alert. Select your host and click the Configuration tab. Click Software > Advanced Settings and go to UserVars. Scroll to the bottom to find UserVars.SessionShellWarning and change the value to 1.

The alert is now missing!