How to grant NON ROOT access to SMH on VMware ESX Server

[Scott Langer]

As far as I can tell, the ROOT user is the only one that is allowed to log into the System Management Homepage on my ESX 3.5 servers (SMH v8.1).

We have some Admins that need to be able to log in and review hardware status and look at server logs but I CAN NOT give them the ROOT Password, nor can I create a user for them that is part of the ROOT group oin the ESX machine.

How can I create a user that will have access to the SMH (read-only) that is not part of the ROOT users group on the ESX box?

I hope this question is posted in the correct grp; I could not find a SMH group on the ITRC forums.

TYIA -Scott

[Olivier Masse · Accepted solution]

As root, open up this file on the service console:
/opt/hp/hpsmh/conf/smhpd.xml

In there you'll have XML tags where you can set which Unix group has access. You can add "users" or any other standard Unix group you wish, e.g:


users

This will give user-level access to any member of the "users" group. That's enough to see the status pages but some actions such as looking at SNMP settings will no longer work.

Then restart SMH with
$ service hpsmhd stop
$ service hpsmhd start

Good luck

[Scott Langer]

thanks, that worked like a charm.