Enable SNMP in VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi 6.x

If you are using SNMP to manage/monitor your devices on your network then you might think about enabling SNMP on your ESXi host, this will give you more information about the performance on your host. Depending on what monitoring/management platform you are using could really make this not a worthwhile change to your ESXi host as a lot of the platforms can communicate with the hosts via vCenter and extract a lot of the performance data. Your mileage will vary!

First, make sure you have enabled SSH access to your ESXi node.
You can do that in Configuration > Security Profile > Services > SSH.

When SSH is enabled, login to your server with ssh and type the following commands to enable a SNMP community named 1L0v3SNMP with your appropriate Location and Contact.

esxcli system snmp set -r
esxcli system snmp set -c 1L0v3SNMP
esxcli system snmp set -p 161
esxcli system snmp set -L "Anytown, USA"
esxcli system snmp set -C [email protected]
esxcli system snmp set -e yes

Make sure you disable SSH after you are done!

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