public/private key authentication to ESXi

Hi,

We are trying to configure SSH access to our ESXi hosts using public/private key authentication for some automation tasks with ansible .

On a Linux system running ansible we generated a key pair using ssh-keygen, then we copied the public key to our esxi host using

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@esxihost1 'cat >> /etc/ssh/keys-root/authorized_keys'

Public key has been verified inside the authorized_keys file

sshd_config had PermitRootLogin set to yes

When we try to SSH to our esxihost1 we are still being prompted for the password

VMware Knowledge Base shows the same process for ssh key authentication

Any help is greatly appreciated