vsphere web client

Adding a customized notification banner in the vSphere UI

03/18/2021 by William Lam 1 Comment

I was recently reminded of an old vCenter Server feature called Message of the Day (MOTD) that I had used quite extensively when I was a customer to easily communicate upcoming patch windows, downtime, updates and other interesting news to my internal users. Back in the day, the vSphere UI was known as the VI Client (C# Client or Thick Client) and once the MOTD is configured, users logging in would see this this custom notification banner across their UI Client.

It has been ages since I had used vCenter's MOTD feature but after sharing this tidbit on Twitter yesterday, I found a mix of folks that were still using this awesome feature including a VMware Cloud on AWS use case to that helped them easily identify a particular environments to users who was just learning about this feature for the first time.

Used this in @vmwarecloudaws to easily identify different environments e.g. Sandbox from Production https://t.co/bu2eaGMJw6 pic.twitter.com/6dMNb940Gb

— Mark McGilly (@MarkMcG_Bel) March 17, 2021

In addition to bringing some awareness to this oldie but goodie feature of vCenter Server, I also wanted to share some details on how you might automate this as I had a few questions about this on Twitter.

Here is a screenshot of my vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment which has been configured with an MOTD and you can see that it can also properly render emojis, so you can certainly have some fun here 🙂

To configure an MOTD, click on the vCenter Server inventory object and then navigate to Configure->Settings->Message of Day and set or disable the message.

For those that wish to configure the MOTD programmatically, you can do so using the vSphere API with your favorite vSphere SDK of your choice including PowerCLI. You will need to use the UpdateServiceMessage() method which is part of the SessionManager object.

If you wish to view or check whether an MOTD is configured, the following PowerCLI snippet can be used:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name vpxd.motd | select Value

However, to configure the MOTD, you can NOT use the Set-AdvancedSetting cmdlet as the advanced setting is a read only value and you must use the vSphere API directly.

Using PowerCLI, here is how to view the current MOTD:

$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.Message

Using PowerCLI, here is how to update/change the MOTD:

$motd = "🚨This is William Lam's environment, it is NOT supported. Use at your own risk 😎"
$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.UpdateServiceMessage($motd)

Quick Tip – How to disable the vCenter Server Update Notification banner?

03/17/2021 by William Lam 3 Comments

I received this question on Twitter from Andreas asking the following:

Is there a way to disable or postpone the #vCenter update notification logon message in the web client? @lamw @vmwarecares @VMwarevSphere pic.twitter.com/tYsikiesIP

— Andreas Peetz🛡️ (@VFrontDe) March 17, 2021

When a new vCenter Server update is available, a notification banner is automatically displayed in the vSphere UI. This functionality was introduced as part of vSphere 7.0 and part of the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) capability. This is a very useful feature since administrators spend most of their time in the vSphere UI and when new update was available, it would only be displayed in the VAMI UI, which most folks were not logging into on a regular basis.

Today, the update notification banner is always displayed and there is no way to temporarily disable it. This can be annoying if you do not intend to update your vCenter Server immediately and I assume this is why Andreas was asking about either postponing or disabling the notification all together.

Currently, the only way I am aware of for disabling this notification is to actually disable the vCenter Server Life-Cycle Manager Remote Plugin itself. You can do this by navigating to Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and then selecting "vCenter Server Life-cycle Manager" and click on the Disable button. You can refresh the webpage or logout and you should no longer see the notification banner.

Disclaimer: By disabling the vCLM plugin, you are disabling more than just the banner but all vCenter vLCM functionality including Interop and Update Planner capabilities. If these are things you require, do not disable the plugin.

I can certainly see a nice feature enhancement in the future where vLCM notifications can be postponed or deferred to a later date. I will share this blog post and feedback with the vLCM PM for consideration.

vYetti – Fun animated vSphere Login UI customization

05/15/2018 by William Lam 10 Comments

For those that have been asking about how to customize the vSphere Client Login UI to include this fun little animated login screen as shown below, you can find the complete instructions on my github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vyetti-vsphere-client-customization

I wanted to take a moment and give thanks and credit to the original author (Darin S) who created the animated login, which he referred to as an "Animated SVG Avatar". I remember seeing this on my Twitter stream a few months back where it was shared on codepen.io, which is a platform for web developers to easily show off their demos. From what I could gather, the original demo had used MorphSVGPlugin.min.js which is a Javascript library that provided the animation. Apparently, the use of this library required a membership which prevented anyone from consuming this outside of codepen.io for demo purposes. While searching online, I accidentally stumbled across another similiar project by Balram Chavan who developed an alternative solution simply using Angular 5. With Balram's solution, I was able to make the necessary minor modifications (thanks to Jeeyun from the Clairty team on helping me with some of my Anuglar questions) to get this fully incorporated into the vSphere Client UI. I am sure there are other improvements that can be made to the customization such as a more "clarity" look/feel as the old the old "blue marge" theme background is pretty dated but I will leave that to someone more creative than me 🙂

Cool browser plugin for Dark Theme vSphere H5 Client

05/12/2018 by William Lam 3 Comments

While catching up on my news feed early this morning, I came across a really slick browser plugin developed by Jens L. that enables a "Dark" theme for the vSphere HTML5 Client (h5client). If you use either Chrome or Firefox, simply visit Bery's Github site here to get a link to the plugin.

Once the plugin has been enabled, simply login to your vSphere H5 Client, this works using vSphere 6.5 or latest 6.7 and you should see the UI automatically render using the Dark theme without any modifications to your vCenter Server. I know the Clarity team is working on an out-of-the-box Dark Theme for the H5 Client, but until then, this is an excellent workaround. I definitely appreciate this as someone who does work either super late at night or super early in the morning and although I use things like Flux to reduce the brightness of the screen, having a proper dark theme also helps. Thanks for the awesome project Bery!

Here is a screenshot of my vSphere 6.5 environment, which I was able to make use of new theme morning 🙂

If you have any feedback or comments, feel free to post an issue on Bery's github project.

Changes to vSphere Client Login UI customizations in vSphere 6.7

05/09/2018 by William Lam 8 Comments

For those that have customized their vSphere Client Login UI using the instructions here and here, it looks like the process can not be applied to the vSphere 6.7 release. From what I can tell, it looks like we have now consolidated the various WAR files into a single file /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/ROOT.war. The original contents of the websso directory, which pertains to the UI customization, is now located here. This was a fairly minor change, but something to be aware of and for details on how to persist your configuration changes, please see the instructions below.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. If you decide to enable this, please use at your own risk and ensure you backup all original files in case you need revert back to the original configuration.

As part of looking into this, I also had some fun incorporating a cool little animated login page directly into the vSphere UI which I had shared on Twitter yesterday. Stay tuned for more details on #vYetti 🙂

Changing “Password will expire in X days” notification for Active Directory users in vSphere Web/H5 Client

11/17/2017 by William Lam 1 Comment

When logging into the vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web (Flex) or H5 Client, one of the validation checks that is automatically performed by the server is to check the current users password expiry. If you account expiry is less than the current password expiry configuration, then you will see the yellow notification pop up at the top stating:

Password will expire in X days

This is definitely a helpful feature to have automatically built into the vSphere UI and the default expiry actually depends on the type of user logging into the system. This last part is sometimes confusing as folks mix up the default Single Sign-On User Expiry with the Active Directory user expiry which is completely different.

Single Sign-On Users

For SSO Domain (vsphere.local by default) users, the password expiry AND notification by default is 90 days. This can be configured in the vSphere Web Client under Administration->Single Sign-On->Configuration->Password Policy as shown in the screenshot below. For those wanting to automate this configuration, there is currently not an SSO Admin API, but there are some options, have a look at this blog post here.

Active Directory Users

If you are logging in as an Active Directory user, the password expiry notification by default is 30 days but the actual password expiry will obviously depend on your Active Directory system. If you want to change the expiry notification in case your expiry is not 30 days or you wish to notify sooner or later, this is actually controlled by the vSphere Web and H5 Client.