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Can the VCSA 6.5 forward to multiple syslog targets?

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I had a couple folks ping me recently asking whether the latest vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 release supports forwarding to multiple syslog targets? Currently today, only a single syslog target is officially supported which can be configured using the VAMI UI. I know this is something our customers have been asking about and I know this is something the VC Engineering team is considering.

Having said that, it is possible to configure additional syslog targets on the VCSA, but please be aware this is not officially supported. A couple of these customers understood the support impact and were still interested in a solution as some of their environments mandated multiple redundant syslog targets and using a syslog forwarder/relay was not an option for them.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

When configuring syslog forwarding from the VAMI UI, the configurations are all written to /etc/vmware-syslog/syslog.conf on the VCSA.

With this information, if we want to add additional targets (which can be of the same configuration or different), you simply append additional targets to the syslog configuration file. For example, if I have two syslog targets 192.168.30.110 and 192.168.30.111 and I wish to use the default log level, TCP and 514, I would use the following:

Once you have saved your changes, you will need to restart the rsyslog service for the change to go into effect. To do so, run the following two commands on the VCSA:

systemctl stop rsyslog
systemctl start rsyslog

One additional thing to note is that the VAMI UI will only show the very last syslog target within the configuration file but if you monitor syslog servers, you will see that logs are indeed being forward to all servers that have been configured in the syslog configuration file.

“Shockwave Flash has crashed” workaround for vSphere Web (Flash) Client

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On Saturday, I started to notice that logins to the vSphere Web (Flex) Client stopped working with Google Chrome. Upon a successful logon, it would immediately crash with "Shockwave Flash has crashed" message. I had seen this message plenty of times in the past and usually restarting Chrome would resolve the problem but this time it looked to be persistent even after a system reboot.

I took to Twitter to see if I was the only one hitting this issue since I was not able to find anything on the web and literally in minutes, I had several dozen replies with folks experiencing the same issue which apparently started several days ago but like most, including myself, thought it was an isolated event.

After a bit of back/fourth and a few other folks chiming in, it looks like Google actually went and published a newer version of Flash (27.0.0.170) with latest Chrome (61.0.3163.100) update. This newer Flash version is not even available for download and the current version as listed on Adobe's website should be 27.0.0.159. This issue not only affects VMware products that uses Flash but any website that has Flash content and I had also noticed few others sharing frustrations on Twitter for other flash-based websites.

Luckily, one workaround that I had found which others have also confirmed is to switch to Firefox which currently does not have this issue Its also been reported that latest updates from Firefox is also distributing the latest Flash which causes the exact same issue. Like most, Chrome is my default browser and it was annoying that I had to switch to another browser but that was the only way I could access the content I needed. Earlier this evening, I was looking at the VMware Reddit Channel and noticed a thread had popped up regarding this exact issue and it looks like more and more folks are now noticing.

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VMworld Hackathon vSphere Client Login UI Theme

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For those of you who attended this years VMworld Hackathon (US/Europe), you may have noticed something different when logging into the vSphere Web/H5 Client? In case you missed it or could not attend, here is a GIF demonstrating what you would have saw:

via GIPHY

No, the VMworld Hackathon environment was not hacked 😉 but instead I had built a very special VMworld Hackathon vSphere Client Login UI Theme for the event. I was also getting tired of looking at our boring blue login screen. Customizing the vSphere Client Login UI has been possible (though not officially supported by VMware) since vSphere 6.0 which I have written about here, here and most recently here (due to vSphere 6.5 Update 1 changes). Having received a large number of requests from folks who attended the Hackathon as well as folks who had heard or saw the customization who wish to replicate this in their own environment, I have posted the instructions below.

This slick customization would not have been possible without the help from Timo Sugliani (thanks dude!) who was the one that made me aware of the two of the creatives that then gave me the idea to combine them into a vSphere Client Login UI Theme. The first is V for Vendetta image which can be found here and the second is super slick interactive Bootstrap animation which can be found here. Lastly, I added my own touch by using a Mr. Robot font from this site here which goes really well with the overall theme.

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vSphere Client Login UI customizations do not persist in VCSA 6.5 Update 1

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The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 Update 1 just GA'ed late last week and like many in the community, I also went ahead and upgraded my home lab to this latest release. vSphere 6.5 Update 1 contains a ton of fixes as well as several new capabilities which you can read all about in the release notes here and here.

One neat little trick I take advantage of in my lab environments when deploying the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is actually pre-filling out the credentials for the vSphere Client UI (not recommended for production environments of course) which I had blogged about here a few years back. Sine I have many different environments for different scenarios, I find myself being lazy and having to type in the credentials to each one of these environments. Instead, I can pre-fill either the username and/or password (which I will stress again, not recommended for production) within the vSphere Client Login UI page which is simply just using HTML.


After making the necessary changes to my VCSA 6.5u1 system, I needed to reboot my ESXi host and when everything came back up, I was surprised to find my changes to the vSphere Client Login UI had disappeared. It took me awhile to figure out why the changes were not persisting across reboots. There seems to be a change in behavior compared to prior releases of the VCSA (6.0 & 6.5) on when this capability was actually possible.

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Visualizing live network traffic on the vCenter Server Appliance using net-glimpse

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Last week I came across a really interesting OSS project called net-glimpse which allows you to easily visualize your network traffic in real-time and making that available using any standard web browser. I thought it would be neat to see what this might look like running on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I got it up in running in just a couple of minutes and even shared the results on Twitter as you can see from the tweet below:


I had couple of folks ask about the setup and I figure I would post a quick write up. While looking at the project, I found that net-glimpse includes quite a bit of customizations in the colors, data collection and how data is displayed. Specifically, rather than relying on the well-known ports that have already been pre-defined, you can also add additional custom ports and specify the label that it should automatically used. This gave me an idea, instead of a generic visualization of the VCSA, we could get specific service information and have those label automatically get displayed.

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New Nested ESXi 6.x Content Library 

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A few years back I had showed how you could create and host your own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which allows customers to decouple their content from the underlying vSphere environment and centralizing their content and making it available to number of vCenter Servers by simply just having an HTTP(s) endpoint. The other huge benefit is being able to take advantage of the existing web content tools for optimizing delivery or retrieval whether that is replication, caching, etc. and not relying a single vCenter Server for providing Content Library publication. In addition to showing how to create your own content libraries, I also had built my own 3rd Party vSphere Content Library which contains a variety of my Nested ESXi Templates (empty VM shells) running on Amazon S3 which can be consumed by anyone as long as you are running vCenter Server 6.0 or newer.

Although the empty Nested ESXi Templates were quite useful for myself and customers, it would have also been nice to include my pre-built Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances which I had recently updated to support vSphere 6.0 Update 3 and vSphere 6.5d (vSAN 6.6). Thanks to Dana Nourie, who runs our wildly popular VMware Flings Program, was kind enough to help me with the content hosting and now anyone can also subscribe to my Nested ESXi VA's and automatically have the content sync down using the vSphere Content Library feature.

UPDATE 1 (07/31/17) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 1 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

UPDATE 2 (05/07/18) - The Nested ESXi Content Library has been updated to include the latest ESXi 6.5 Update 2 VA. If you are already subscribing to the library, it should have already pulled down the content (or at least the metadata which you can then force synchronization) or you can simply subscribe to the library and have access to the latest ESXi VA.

To get started, just create a new vSphere Content Library and enter the following subscription URL: https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/lib.json 


You can either download the content immediately or only when you need to use it. I recommend the former since its only two images which totals up to a whopping 1GB 😉

Once the creation of the Content Library has been completed, you should see the following two Nested ESXi VAs in the library which are now ready for deployment!


For more information about the Nested ESXi 6.0u3/6.5d VA's and how they work, please have a look at this blog post here. For more information about the Nested ESXi Templates and how to subscribe to the 3rd Party vSphere Content Library, please have a look at this blog post here.