Rich Brambley has been checking out vreference.com’s report that there is a dangerous default in ESX 4.
VMware are aware of this potential problem and according to Rich’s post they will be correcting this in future releases, but for now VI admins need to be aware of the issue:
If the key combination of Ctrl+Alt+Del is entered at the Service Console the ESX host will begin a shutdown which will stop all virtual machines running on the host in the process. Read the full vreference post for more details.
Rich tested this on an ESX 4 host running in a VMware Player VM on his notebook and captured the shutdown and reboot in this video.
DON’T HIT CTRL + ALT + DEL ON ESX 4 from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.
there is a manual workaround to disable this default behavior until VMware provides an update. Use the instructions provided in the previously mentioned vreference.com post.
