Deactivate Support for Non-ASCII Characters on ESXi

You can deactivate support for non-ASCII characters for virtual machine files and directory names by using two methods, depending on the ESXi version.

By default, ESXi supports the use of non-ASCII characters for virtual machine file and directory names.

If you need to deactivate support for non-ASCII characters, for ESXi 7.0 Update 2 and later, see VMware knowledge base articles 82227 and 93720.

Prior to ESXi 7.0 Update 2, you can deactivate this support by modifying the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml file with the following steps:

Procedure

1. Using a text editor, open the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml file for the ESXi host.
2. Within the <config></config> tag, add the following code.
   <g11nSupport>false</g11nSupport>
3. Save and close the file.
4. Reboot the host.
   After you deactivate this support, you can still enter non-ASCII characters for virtual machine names. vSphere user interfaces display the virtual machine names in the non-ASCII characters, but ESXi converts the actual file and directory names to ASCII strings.