How to enable/disable the VMware ESXi 5.x firewall

I just installed a fresh VMware ESXi 5.5 and configured the firewall using vSphere client to not allow remote connections. When testing the firewall I noticed that the rules weren’t working. There seems to be no way to see the status of the firewall or enable/disable it through vSphere but it turned out to be disabled by default.

To enable the firewall, log in to SSH and type this command:

esxcli network firewall set --enabled true

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