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vSphere Web Client Plugin for Custom Attributes

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I just learned about a very cool vSphere Web Client Plugin that was developed by a fellow vExpert, Patrick Haefner who shared this during the South Germany VMUG back in February of last year. The custom vSphere Web Client Plugin allows administrators to view Custom Attributes in the vSphere Web Client which is currently not available today. The Custom Attributes vSphere Web Client is hosted on the VMUG site and you will need to register to access the download page found here.

Disclaimer: This plugin is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To install the Custom Attributes plugin, you just need to extract the contents of the zip file and you will should see a directory called haif-customfields-ui. You will need to copy this directory to your vCenter Server which is running the vSphere Web Client. This plugin should work on both vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.

For Windows vCenter Server:

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service

For VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client stop
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client start

Once the vSphere Web Client has been started, you can now login and for Virtual Machines or ESXi hosts which have Custom Attributes, you should now see a new portlet displaying the Custom Attributes as seen in the screenshot below.

I think this is a really cool plugin and shows how extensible the vSphere Web Client is by leveraging the vSphere Web Client SDK. With a bit of imagination, you can pretty much build anything! Though today Patrick's plugin only allows you to view the Custom Attributes, perhaps if there is enough requests, he may add the ability to modify Custom Attributes. Awesome work Patrick and thanks for sharing it with the community!

Big thanks to Ruediger M. who works as a VMware SE in Germany for sharing this awesome information. This is definitely a plugin I will be installing in my environments 🙂

Quick Tip - How to quickly find the release & build number on VCSA

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I have been spending quite a bit of time in the lab lately (researching, prototyping, breaking things, etc.) and one of the challenges I have is figuring out which environment I am actually logged into. I literally have a dozen VCSA (vCenter Server Appliances) deployed for various testing and I always forget the build and release the system I am currently logged into. A quick way to get this information on your VCSA is to run the following command:

vpxd -v

Note: There is also vpxd.exe for vCenter Server running on Windows which you can also use.

I also noticed in the VCSA 5.1 it used to provide the vCenter Server build and release number when SSH into the host but it looks like this has now changed with the VCSA 5.5 release. I suspect this might be related to some of the security hardening that has been done by VMware on our appliances (which is great) and I assume there maybe an issue by providing the build and version info as part of the SSH banner.

If you wish to re-enable this feature, you can just edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config and specify the banner to point to /etc/ssh/banner which will includes both the release and build information. In any case, if you are in a pinch and need to quickly figure out the version, you can use the command above.

How to automate NTP configurations on the VCSA using the CLI

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NTP configurations should be a mandatory setting for everyone, regardless of whether we are talking about VMware products or general infrastructure software. It is just as critical as having proper DNS configured and can cause a whole slew of issues if not configured or setup properly. A question that was raised internally a couple of days back was around automating NTP configurations on the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) which is normally performed through the VAMI web interface as seen in the screenshot below.

Instead of using the VAMI UI, the user was interested in automating it through the command-line and wondered if this was possible. This is definitely possible among other VAMI operations by leveraging the vpxd_servicecfg utility and there are a couple of options when configuring NTP on a VCSA 5.5 system.

The option that most of you will probably using is to configure a list of NTP servers (comma separated). To do so, you can run the following command (replace the NTP server with your own):

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write ntp '172.30.0.100' ''

This command should have a return code of 0, else there maybe an issue connecting to your time source from the VCSA. You can also confirm the operation was successful or query the current configuration by running the following command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync read

If you wish to synchronize your time with the underlying ESXi host through VMware Tools, then you can run the following command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write tools '' ''

Finally, if you wish to disable time synchronization on the VCSA for whatever reason, you can do so by running this command:

/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg timesync write none '' ''

Note: If the VCSA is joined to an Active Directory domain, then the time synchronization is provided by your Active Directory server and no additional configurations are required.

Once you have configured your NTP servers, you should can also manually force a sync to ensure the current date/time is correct by running the following command:

sntp -P no -r [NTP-SERVER]