How to Change the Splash Screen In vMA

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.