Avoiding accidental server reboot with vSphere 4

During my last customer install of vSphere ESX 4.0 Update 1, I discovered an “undocumented” issue that causes some concern. It appears that with the introduction of vSphere (this was not the case with ESX 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5), the host can be rebooted using the Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard combination at the console login screen—with or without the system being logged in. This can cause some serious issues in environments that have the ESX hosts controlled by a central KVM solution that is also controlling Windows servers. The good news is that this “feature” can be disabled, and even completed without a host reboot. 

In order to change this so that Ctrl-Alt-Del will be ignored by the host:

1. Log in to the Host console
2. Edit the following file using VI or nano — \etc\inittab (ex. nano \etc\inittab)
3. Locate the line — ca::ctrlaltdel :/sbin/shutdown –t3 –r now
4. Comment out this line by placing a # character in the beginning of the text (ex. # ca::ctrlaltdel :/sbin/shutdown –t3 –r now)
5. Save the file
6. To make the change effective without rebooting the host, run the command init q (this will reparse/reload the file)

VMware is now aware of this problem, and I'm sure will be working to correct it. In the meantime, have you encountered this issue?