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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 🙂

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]

How to restart the ESXi management network via command-line?

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A great question that was brought up on Twitter yesterday by Andreas Peetz who asked the following:

Is there a way to restart the mgmt network in ESXi via a cmd line? You can do this from the DCUI, but I want a script! 

There are a variety of reasons why you would want to restart the Management Network on your ESXi host and usually it is related to troubleshooting or configurations such as renewing the DHCP lease on a particular VMkernel interface. For Andreas, it was renewing the DHCP lease and this is actually a use case I have heard from others before. Currently, the only way to restart the Management Network for your ESXi host is using the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) either through the console using iLO/iDRAC/etc. or remotely over SSH.

Andreas' question is not a new one and I have heard this ask in the past. I have even inquired about it when I was a customer but was told it was not possible and had to use the DCUI. I was not really satisfied with the answer I provided to Andreas, so I decided to do a bit of digging myself and ping some engineers. Apparently this functionality is actually exposed through a legacy command-line utility called esxcfg-vmknic in the ESXi Shell as well as locally/remotely via the ESXCLI network namespace which is used to manage the VMkernel interface (Thanks to Andres for mentioning ESXCLI method).

There are two flags that this command supports which is to enable and disable a VMkernel interface. This is actually what the DCUI is doing when you ask it to restart the Management Network and is very similar to restarting a service on a UNIX/Linux system, it first shutdowns the service and then starts it back up. Given this information, if you wish to restart the Management Network of your ESXi host you can specify the name of the Management Network portgroup and execute the enable operation immediately after performing the disable operation.

To do this from the command-line, you would add a ; (semi-colon) between the two commands so they are executed one after another to ensure your VMkernel interface is enabled after you have disabled it. Here is an example of the command:

esxcli network ip interface set -e false -i vmk0; esxcli network ip interface set -e true -i vmk0