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You are here: Home / ESXi / vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 6: Customizing VCSA's DCUI

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 6: Customizing VCSA's DCUI

04.21.2015 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

For those of you who have deployed the latest VCSA 6.0, you may have noticed that it now includes a DCUI interface similar to that of ESXi. Just like ESXi, it provides some basic functionality such as network configuration, restarting of the management interface, enabling SSH/Shell access and viewing support logs. For some customers, there is a mandatory requirement in terms of compliance to be able to display a security or warning banner prior to logging into a system which can also include interactive console UI's like the DCUI.

With ESXi, it was possible to customize the DCUI as seen in the screenshot below (more serious customizations are used in customer environments of course). For more details, please take a look at this blog post here.

dcui4
Luckily, with the VCSA 6.0, it is also now possible to customize some of the text on the DCUI interface. However, you will not have complete free range like you did with the ESXi's DCUI interface but will be specific part of the screen. Here is an example of what can be added to the VCSA's DCUI screen:

customizing-vcsa-dcui
There is a section before the IP Address and a section after the IP Address which you can append custom text. This is controlled by the following configuration file located in: /etc/vmware/appliance/dcui.cfg and specifically with the following two variables: CONNECTION_MESSAGE which is the message before the IP Address and CONNECTION_MESSAGE_AFTER_IP for the message after the IP Address.

Here is an example of what the above customization looks like:

{
    "PRODUCT_NAME": "VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0",
    "CONNECTION_MESSAGE_BEFORE_IP": "https://",
    "CONNECTION_PORT": "443",
    "CONNECTION_MESSAGE": "\n\t### Message BEFORE IP ###\n",
    "CONNECTION_MESSAGE_AFTER_IP": "\n\n\t### Message AFTER IP ###\n"
}

For the changes to take affect, you will need to reload the DCUI interface which you can do by running the following command:

kill $(ps -ef | grep dcui.py | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')

  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 1: What install & deployment parameters did I use?
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 2: What is my SSO Domain Name & Site Name?
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 3: Finding all deployed Platform Services Controller
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 4: Finding all deployed vCenter Servers
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 5: New method of patching the VCSA
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 6: Customizing VCSA’s DCUI
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 7: Connecting to SSO/PSC using JExplorer
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 8: Useful ldapsearch queries for vmdird
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 9: Creating & managing SSO users using dir-cli
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 10: Automating SSO Admin configurations
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 11: Automate SSO Admin password change
  • vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 12: New methods of downloading Support Bundles for VCSA / PSC

More from my site

  • vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) PowerCLI 6.5 community module
  • vCommunity "shorts" on their experiences w/the VCSA Migration
  • VCSA 6.5 CLI Installer now supports new ovftool argument pass-through feature
  • VCSA alarm for VCDB space utilization in vSphere 6.5
  • Updates to VMDK partitions & disk resizing in VCSA 6.5

Categories // ESXi, Security, VCSA, vSphere 6.0 Tags // dcui, vcenter server appliance, vcsa, vcva

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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