I recently had the pleasure to somehow provide my customer with a simple remote kill & boot button for various machines running on a single ESXi (6.5.0) host. If you ever had to deal with ESXi, you know it is a rather confusing mess of different tools and versions, that tightly interact with each other. Long story short, ESXi on a free license doesn’t provide a dedicated API for such tasks and an upgrade is quite costly.

I know security monks gonna be indignant on my solution especially because it relies on SSH, but if your environment is not critical…