WilliamLam.com

Monitoring vSphere account password & permission changes 

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If it is not clear by now, I REALLY love the power of vSphere Events and all the use cases it can enable, especially when used with our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to enable easy Event-Driven Automation.

Over the past month or so, I have noticed a series of questions from our field and customers across a number of topics pertaining to vSphere accounts including vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) users. My response to each of these questions all point back to a leveraging specific vSphere Events and I thought I share some of use cases in which vSphere Events can help

  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was changed?
  • How much time left (expiry) before the vSphere SSO user password must be changed?
  • Audit of all password changes for an vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • Who recently updated the password for a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was reseted?
  • Who recently added new permission to a vSphere user?
  • Who recently removed a permission from a vSphere user?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role with additional permissions?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role and removed permissions?

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Managing VM snapshot retention policies using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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vSphere Snapshots is an amazing technology that has enabled our customers to do so many amazing things from application lifecycle and testing to operating system updates and many other use cases. Like any technology, if it is miss-used, the benefits can quickly turn into challenge or nightmare.

As Peter Parker once said, "With great power comes great responsibility" which I think is one way to summarize VM snapshot usage 😆


I am pretty sure that every VI Admin out there has at least one story about vSphere snapshots gone wrong. Due to the convenience, ease of use and some times miss-understanding of how vSphere snapshot works, it can lead to a number of issues including filling up your storage and impacting other running workloads.

Now, imagine if you could implement a snapshot retention policy for your VM(s) based on the size of a given snapshot or maybe the number of days the snapshot has existed? Would that not be cool!?

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Automating the new VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) User Notification Preferences

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Last week the VMware Cloud team released one of the highly requested feature which is the ability to control notification preferences for an individual user, which is provided as part of the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) service. Users can now login to the VMware Cloud Console (VMC UI) and on left hand side, you should now see a new Notification Preferences tab which will allow you to specify which notifications you wish to receive via the Email channel.


As of writing this blog post, there is currently over 200+ notifications that can be configured which are broken up across the following four categories:

  • Elastic DRS (7)
  • Organization General (128)
  • SDDC Maintenance (61)
  • VMware Site Recovery Service (23)

Today, the notification preferences is configured on a per-use basis and by default, users are automatically subscribed to all notifications. The ability to customize is great but with over 200+ notifications to select or de-select from, this could be a difficult task, especially with a large number of users who may or may not understand each and ever single notification type. This is certainly an area the VMware Cloud team will be looking to enhance in the future to make it even easier to consume and customize.

In the mean time, to help with making this customization change easier within your organization, we can also take advantage of the new NGW Notification Preferences API. What better way to demonstrate this than incorporating this into my VMware Cloud Notification Gateway Community PowerShell Module, which is also available for consumption within the PowerShell Gallery.

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