Hi ,

Try below

Login to the ESXi console and ran this command

# less /var/log/auth.log

You can see below example when I given wrong password second time it triggered error message

2017-03-02T08:30:57Z sshd[751607]: Connection from 192.168.1.50 port 55000

2017-03-02T08:31:02Z sshd[751607]: Accepted keyboard-interactive/pam for root from 10.20.2.17 port 55000 ssh2

2017-03-02T08:31:02Z sshd[751607]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)

2017-03-02T08:31:02Z sshd[751610]: Session opened for 'root' on /dev/char/pty/t0

2017-03-02T08:31:34Z sshd[751644]: Connection from 192.168.1.50 port 55075

2017-03-02T08:31:39Z sshd[751645]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=10.20.2.17  user=root

2017-03-02T08:31:41Z sshd[751644]: error: PAM: Authentication failure for root from 192.168.1.50