I saw a post on the VMTN forums the other day about unregistering a vCenter plugin. The user had a bad installation of an early preview of NetApp's VSC utility. After uninstalling the plugin, the user was still unable to unlink the plugin from vCenter. There is actually a pretty simple solution to this problem which can be accomplished by using the vSphere MOB.
UPDATE (10/16/22) - As of vSphere 8, you can now easily unregister vCenter plugins within the vSphere UI. Select the specific plugin and then click on remove button.
Here are the instructions to remove a specific plugin/extension from your vCenter server:
1. Point your web browser to your vCenter server: https://your_vc_server/mob and login.
2. Click on content:
3. Locate and click on ExtensionManager:
4. Click on the plugin you are interested in removing:
5. Record the plugin key id which will be used to remove the plugin:
6. Now, go back to previous page and at the bottom click on the function "UnregisterExtension". A new window will open and ask for the plugin key id which was recorded from above. Enter the key and click on the "Invoke Method" to remove the plugin
You can now refresh the page and you will see that the plugin is no longer available. You can restart your vSphere Client to see that the plugin has now been removed.
The following operation can also be performed using a script, here is a vSphere SDK for Perl script that does just that: pluginExtensionManager.pl
Thx dude for this, solved a problem I had for months.
All 3rd party apps don't allways play well when deleting the VM . . . 😉
cheers
Presumably this could be scripted with PowerCLI? I'm guessing you'd need Get-View which might be beyond my skills.
Ed.
@Ed,
That's correct, this just uses the vSphere API, so this can be re-written in any of the vSphere SDK's. You will need to get a reference to Extension Manager to perform operations for the plugins.
--William
Thanks for this tip -- I finally unregistered an old chargeback plugin! 🙂
Thanks so much! Needed this to remove NetApp VSC 1.0 plugin.
Great tip, also used it to remove NetApp VSC 1.0 plugin. 🙁
Cool, William. But how to execute some task from some extension. F.E. there is com.vmware.vcIntegrity in the extension's list. And this extension has some tasks. Could you execute some ?
Excellent guide, removed the vCenter Operations Manager plugin with succes!
Exactly what I needed. Simple and effective. Thanks!
Thanks, William. Needed this method to unregister a Dell vCenter Plugin that was outdated.
Nearly 3 years later, this is still helpful! Thanks, William!
Thank you very much for this, had to unregister a broken veeam plugin and this worked like a charm!
Excellent info, very helpful thanks man 🙂
Jonathan Medd wrote up some PowerCLI functions for removing vCenter plugins here. Nice work!
http://www.jonathanmedd.net/2012/02/managing-vcenter-plugins-with-powercli.html