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The results for the Top 25 Virtualization Blogs was just posted a few days ago by Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com and I am very proud and honored to announce that virtuallyGhetto has moved up from last year's #8 spot to the #6 spot on the list! I am also very honored that virtuallyGhetto was also voted as the #1 scripting blog! This was quite a surprise to me especially when you are up against guys like Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank Eric for all of the time and effort he has put into setting up the site and tallying up all the votes, this is not an easy task. I would also like to thank all of my readers for voting and for your continued support. Finally, I would like to congratulate all the bloggers and give a special shout out to some of the new guys who made the top 25 this year like Michael Webster, Chris Wahl and of course the Storage Guru himself and my good colleague Cormac Hogan! Congratulations guys! I am really humbled to be part of such a talented and passionate community, there is no other like it!

I do not want to spoil the results, so be sure to watch the special vChat results episode and visits Eric's site for the full list.

I recently came across an interesting VMTN thread in which I learned about a neat little feature that allows a user to configure an inactivity timeout for the vSphere C# Client. Once the timeout value has been reached, the vSphere Client will automatically disconnect from the server(vCenter 5.0 or ESXi 5.0 Server). This feature looks to have been introduced with the release of vSphere 5 and was noted in thick-client-timeout guideline in recent release of the vSphere 5 Security Hardening Guide to help reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

There are two methods you can configure the inactivity timeout value:

• Command-line argument to vSphere Client executable
• vSphere Client configuration file (VpxClient.exe.config)

To configure using the command-line argument, locate the vSphere Client executable on your desktop and right click and select properties. You will need to add -inactivityTimeout X, where X is the number of minutes before the vSphere Client will automatically disconnect from the server.

To configure using the vSphere Client configuration file, you will need to locate the VpxClient.exe.config (thanks to user regnak2012 for identifying the required XML entry).

Depending on whether you are running a 32bit or 64bit WindowsOS, they will be located in one of the two places:

• 32bit - %PROGRAMFILES%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher
• 64bit - %PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher

Next, you will need to right click on VpxClient.exe.config and edit the file using an editor such as notepad. Add the following entry right above the cmdlineFallback, where X is the number of minutes for the timeout value and save then save the file.

To validate that inactivity timeout value works, just connect to either a vCenter Server 5.0 or ESXi 5.0 Server and wait for it to disconnect after the timeout value has been violated. In this example, I configured it for 1 minute and you should see the following screen below once it has disconnected.

Since this feature is client side only, a user can easily change or update this timeout value. One option to guarantee this configuration is by ThinApp-ing your vSphere Client, this way you can control who has access and what the inactivity timeout should be. This can really help when it comes to auditing client side system.

While looking into the vSphere Client options, I also came across a few others that are not documented but might come in handy.

Disclaimer: These are not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk. 

Ignore Certificate - If you have a self-signed SSL certificate when you first connect to an ESX(i) or vCenter Server, you probably have seen the following:

You can automatically ignore this message by specifying the -i command-line option OR add in the VpxClient.exe.config file.

Expand Inventory - If you want to have your entire vSphere inventory automatically expanded out for you each time you login (this may not be a good idea for very large environments) you can specify -expAll command-line option OR add in the VpxClient.exe.config file.

Disable All vSphere Plugins - If you want to prevent any vSphere Plugins from loading, you can specify -noPlugins  command-line option OR add in the VpxClient.exe.config file.

To customize the default splash screen on vMA 5.x, you just need to edit /opt/vmware/etc/isv/welcometext which contains the version of vMA and the management URL as the default.

In addition to adding your own custom text, there are a few special variables that can use within the file and they should all be pretty self-explanatory:

${app.name}
${app.version}
${app.ip}
${app.url}
${vami.port}
${vami.url}

Here is an example of custom welcometext file:

This is a message on the vMA Splash Screen!
visit www.virtuallyghetto.com

Here are some default variables you can use:

app.name = ${app.name}
app.version = ${app.version}
app.ip = ${app.ip}
app.url = ${app.url}
vami.port = ${vami.port}
vami.url = ${vami.url}

The vami_login script is what controls the splash screen display and for the changes to take effect, you will need to restart the process. To do so, you just need to kill the current vami_login process and it will automatically respawn.

sudo kill $(ps -ef | grep vami_login | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')

Here is a screenshot of what the splash screen looks like after modifying the welcomtext file:

If you are interested in customizing other parts of vMA such as the MOTD (message of the day) which is the text that would be dispalyed upon a successful login, you can edit /etc/motd file. If you are interested in customizing the banner during an SSH connection, you can edit /etc/ssh/banner.

Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com just released the annual Top 25 Virtualization Blog results for 2012 this weekend and I am very proud and honored to announce that virtuallyGhetto has moved up from last year's #25 spot to now the #8 spot on the list! It was only a year ago that virtuallyGhetto first made it onto the Top 25 Virtualization Blog after only been around for 4 months. I am very humble to be among some of the smartest and most respected folks in the virtualization community!

New this year, in addition to the top virtualization blog post are the individual categories such as top storage, video, news, etc blogs. Of course scripting was one of the categories and though I did not get number 1, which went to my good friend/colleague Alan Renouf. I did win second place and following third went to Luc Dekens, another awesome scripter/friend in the scripting/automation community.

I wanted to take this time and thank all my readers and supporters from the blog, VMTN forums, twitter and email for voting for virtuallyGhetto! I am very happy to see that the topics/content that interests me also interest others and I really appreciate your support. I hope to continue to put out great and unique content in 2012 and beyond. Thank you again for all your support!

Lastly, I wanted to give shout out to some of the guys who made the top favorite new blogs: Barry Coombs, Josh Atwell, Andrew Mauro to just name a few and Jake Robinson (who did not make it to that list!?). Keep doing what you are doing and never give up, it will all payoff at the end!

Congrats to all the Top 25 virtualization bloggers! 2012 will be be another great year for bloggers!

Some may call him a medical practitioner, some may refer to him as Cloud City's VMware Architect and others may know him as the VMware Stig ...

but all we know is he is the Great John Troyer!

First off I would like to wish John a Happy Birthday today and hope you have a vAwesome day!

Christopher Kusek, who you may know him as cxi on Twitter reached out to the vExpert community about a month ago regarding a secret embargoed project. We wanted a way to show John our appreciation and all the hard work and dedication he has done for the VMware and virtualization community. What better way than a bunch of blog posts thanking John from the vExpert crew!

I have known John for about three years now and have interfaced with him on many occasions from late night twitter DMs on vSpam in the VMTN blog, access to new VMware betas and embargo briefings, VMTN community forum feedback/improvements and access to VMware engineers for variety of Q/A and bug related questions.

For those of you who do not know John Troyer, he is the social media strategist for VMware, but John really does way more than that. He takes part in supporting the popular VMware Community Forums, VMTN Blogs and PlanetV12n along with several other individuals, he runs the extremely well known VMware Community Podcast every week in which he invites guests from all over to discuss all things VMware and virtualization and he is also the guy who created and runs the VMware vExpert program just to name a few.

John is a very genuine guy and really likes to help others whether it's getting someone in touch with a VMware product manager for more details about a topic or helping a fellow blogger attend a VMworld conference through a blogger's pass because he/she could not afford to attend. I think John has definitely raised the bar not only in the changes to come for the vExpert program of 2011 (which I am personaly excited about) but the VMware community bar as well.

I can not think of a single technology company that has such a great user community with an incredible amount of sharing and collaboration than the VMware/virtualization community. I think part of the reason why our community is so successful is due to people like John who fosters an active communication with the user base.

Cheers to all of John's achievements, his hard work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I would like to personally say Thank You!