Change ESXi 5.0 Shell keyboard layout with esxcli

If you have to login into the ESXi 5.0 Shell and the keyboard layout is not the one you are used to this post will show how to quickly change it.

As always in vSphere 5 we are going to use esxcli command to get the job done.

Get current keyboard layout

As you can see we are using system settings keyboard layout namespaces and the command get. The other available commands are list and set.

List available layouts

Change keyboard layout

The syntax for the command can be retrieved by appending –help to the command.

Now change the layout to US Default.

Keep in mind that this will change the layout permanently, as it can be seen in the command help the layout can also be changed only for the current boot and it will be reset to its original value during next reboot of the host.

With the —no-persist option the host will report its original layout.

Juanma.