vSphere UI Client Plugin named N/A after vSphere 8 upgrade

This past weekend I finally got a chance to upgrade my personal homelab to vSphere 8, which went super smooth! As shared on Twitter and Mastadon, I started with my VCSA which was running vSphere 7.0 Update 3h and once that had completed and running for a couple of days, I then upgraded my single ESXi host which was running 7.0 Update 3g which runs on Supermicro E200-8D.

just successfully upgraded Supermicro E200-8D from 7.0u3g to ESXi 8.0, though I had to add HW flag as CPU may not be supported in future

ESXI_VERSION=ESXi-8.0.0-20513097-standard
esxcli software profile update -d https://t.co/cs4yUyvnxQ -p ${ESXI_VERSION} --no-hardware-warning pic.twitter.com/hnEspuEDpE

— William Lam (@*protected email*) (@lamw) November 20, 2022

After was functional after the upgrade, including the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) UI Plugin 😀

This morning, I happened to navigate over to the vSphere UI Client Plugin screen under Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and I noticed I had one plugin named "N/A" and was was showing incompatible.

I was not sure what the plugin was and raised this internally with the vSphere UI team on whether this was expected and if there was something I needed to do. It turns out this was the default vCloud Availability plugin for vCloud Director that ships with a vCenter Server deployment and it uses the deprecated local plugin architecture and this particular version of plugin is no longer applicable or compatible with vSphere 8.

With that said, there is a newer version of the plugin that is deployed automatically as part vSphere 8 called VMware Cloud Provider Services Plugin and it also uses the new remote plugins architecture. The question that I had was that since this is a default plugin that is shipped with vCenter Server and a newer version is automatically available, why not clean up or remove the previous plugin? The answer that I had received was that customers could be using this plugin in a Linked Mode configuration and unregistering the plugin would negatively affect those users and hence it was left alone.

If are NOT using this plugin, it is safe to unregister and remove the plugin. Unlike a typical vSphere UI plugin which can be simply be unregistered using the vSphere UI as of vSphere 8, this plugin uses the old vSphere Lookup Service method and require a few additional steps.

Step 1 - SSH to the VCSA as root

Step 2 - Use the Lookup Service utility (lstools.py) to find the service ID for the plugin you which to unregister by running the following command:

/usr/lib/vmware-lookupsvc/tools/lstool.py list --url http://localhost:7090/lookupservice/sdk --product com.vmware.h4

You should get back only single response and make a note of the Service ID which is required in the next step.
Step 3 - We can now unregister the plugin by providing the Service ID along with the administrator credentials by running the following command:

/usr/lib/vmware-lookupsvc/tools/lstool.py unregister --url http://localhost:7090/lookupservice/sdk --id 9372294c-254e-4f87-8346-9ebdb4b44525 --user administrator[at]vsphere[dot]local --password VMware1!

Step 4 - Finally, we need to restart the vSphere UI Client service for the changes to take affect by running the following command:

service-control --restart vsphere-ui

If you now refresh your vSphere UI, you will no longer see the "N/A" plugin.