The big advantage of ESX server is that the OS is as lean as possible, reducing the Host OS overhead to it's minimum and thus maximizing the performance of your VM's.
If you want to install a GUI to ESX Server you might as well not use that, and rather go for VmWare server which runs on top of your favorite OS and GUI. Besides, VmWare Server is free.
The problem is, that we want a simple way of solving future problems on the server and the biggest reason for installing a GUI is the handy explorer included.
(Isn't it possible to only start gnome when needed)
I agree with bleeuwen. Do not install Gnome on your ESX box, use VI client. It will take up resources on your host and increase the complexity of troubleshooting problems (as you are introducing non-ESX software). VMware support engineers may give you less support because of instaling Gnome. VI client provides a remote GUI tool to manage all aspects of your ESX host(s). Rarely is anything else needed or recommended to troubleshoot. ESX is very stable and tinkering around with the filesystem is not recommended or supported. As Bleeuwen mentioned, you can use WinSCP to remotely browse the filesystem (we use Putty).
@rindi: ok I'll look for that and hope a installer can be downloaded instead of using the yum install lists, that are empty in ESX. (because samba wasn't in that either)
@bleeuwen: I know that esx hosts can be managed that way, Is the SCPserver as default activated on a linux or ESX server?
can someone tell me how to download gnome using wget and install it?
It wouldn't only be gnome that you need, but also X etc. It is a big tool and as mentioned earlier, not needed on ESX, it also adds security weaknesses etc, and if you need to troubleshoot things the issues you'd have would mainyl be about X and gnome, but not ESX.
Ok, you have convinced me not installing gnome, I like putty too, but i'm not finding it easy to copy a file from and to the server, now I'm using apt-get for this, not really handy...
maybe a samba share is an option, is it a good choice installing webmin (for managing samba and shorewall or iptables) and a shorewall firewall?
(when I'm back at work, I'll try WinSCP, it's using SSH I suppose?)
SCP does indeed use SSH. It is secure copy protocol. It isn't really for issuing commands to the remote OS. You would use SSH (Putty) for that. Webmin is not a good choice for all of the reasons we mentioned above.
For copying files use WinSCP. It is a GUI product that will let you copy files back and forth from your ESX server to your Windows management machine. http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
Again, with the firewall, why would you use a third-party management product? In Virtual Infrastructure, you can transfer files from your datastores to your management machine, reboot the ESX host, reconfigure all settings (basically), configure basic firewall settings (Security Profile), and many other features. You should configure the firewall, if necessary, through the VI client. ESX uses a special firewall command called esxcfg-firewall. Installing all of this extra stuff won't really add any features and will probably cause lots of issues down the road. ESX is only as stable as you let it be. Only use VMware approved commands and management tools (VI client or web access). I just don't get what these tools would add the VI client doesn't already do.
Here is the simplest way to easily copy files between ESX servers and also WIN<->ESX: http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-fastscp.html But why not use following built-in functionality: "scp filename user@another.esx.server:/directory/to/store/file" ?
