Following on from yesterday’s post, here is how to enter or leave maintenance mode on an ESXi host via SSH:
vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
to go into maintenance mode – and to leave it:
vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
If you’re interested in other useful commands, you can see more hostsvc options by running:
vim-cmd hostsvc
This is a useful command to know as it is one of the critical steps in applying some patches to ESXi remotely.