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How to customize the login UI for vRealize {Operations Manager, Log Insight, Automation}?

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With so much excitement and positive feedback (internal/external) regarding my article on customizing the login UI for the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client, I knew it was only a matter of time before folks started asking about customizing other VMware login UIs. As I have mentioned already, going beyond just the aesthetics such as adding an organizations logo or colors, it is often a mandatory requirement for many organizations to display a security or warning banner to users prior to logging in. I was recently added into an internal Socialcast thread asking whether it would be possible to do the same for vRealize Operations Manager (vROps).

I figure I take a quick look to see if this was possible and what it might take. I wanted to also take this opportunity and share a few other solutions that other VMware folks have found in terms of customizing the login UIs for both vRealize Log Insight (thanks GSS Engineer Alan Castonguay for sharing the details) and vRealize Automation (thanks to Justin Jones for his awesome tool). You can find all the details below as well as some additional tidbits through my exploration.

Something that can be helpful in the future as more products integrate with vCenter's SSO (PSC in vSphere 6.0) is that you only need to customize the login page once and it will be available to all other solutions.

UPDATE (03/03/2025) - Customizations for Aria Operations 8.18.x is still applicable, but the login.jsp will need to be updated. (Thanks to Brock Peterson for confirming)

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

vROps (vRealize Operations Manager)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vROps 6.0. The first is the login.jsp file that controls the login UI. If you wish to simply replace the entire image, it will require some tweaking as the login UI is actually composed of several graphical elements making this task a bit more difficult. The second is the images directory which you will want to upload any content you wish to use for the login UI.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

  • /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/pages/login.jsp
  • /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/tomcat-web-app/webapps/vcops-web-ent/images

Due to the various tweaks, I have created a sample login.jsp which you can download and reference here. This will allow you to replace the entire background for the vROps login UI as well as adding in some text that you wish to display. I know how big of a fan Rawlinson Rivera is of Justin Bieber, so I thought I use his favorite background for creating what an a custom vROps login UI can potentially look like.

customize-vrealize-operations-manager-login-ui

vRLI (vRealize Log Insight)

Here are the two locations if you wish to customize the login UI for vRLI 2.5. The first is the main login background image which is a 600x410 image if you wish to stick with the default layout. The second is a 300x78 transparent image for the vRLI logo, you can either keep this or replace it with your own.

Note: Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore the system defaults.

  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/misc/login-bg.png
  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/images/logo/vmware-logo-big-white-v2.png

If you wish to add additional text to the login page, you can edit the following file which controls the login UI.

  • /usr/lib/loginsight/application/3rd_party/apache-tomcat-6.0.36/webapps/ROOT/loginsight/login/login.css

Here is a quick example by inserting the following above Line 20:

<div style="color:#ffffff;text-align:center;font-size:20px">Punching Cloud Edition</div>

Here is an example of what custom login UI for vRLI could potentially look like:

customize-vrealize-log-insight-login-ui

vRA (vRealize Automation)

As a bonus, if you are interested in customizing the Login UI for vRA, be sure to check out fellow Automation colleague Justin Jones who has built this really cool utility called vRA Brand Customizer to help with customizing vRA login UI for the various tenants in your environment. I would recommend keeping an eye on this tool for some really cool stuff coming in the future 😉

Fun end of the year facts on virtuallyGhetto

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I woke up at 6am this past Sunday for no apparent reason. Perhaps my body is preparing me for parenthood? In any case, I could not go back to sleep and started to think about some of the blogs I have written this past year on virtuallyGhetto (finishing its 5th year). With the year almost ending, I thought it would be cool to check out some of the statistics on virtuallyGhetto for this past year and share some of the fun facts with my readers. The data below is gathered by a WordPress plugin called Jetpack which is a must have for any bloggers using WordPress and the WP Statistics Plugin.

I would also like to take this moment and say thank you to all my sponsors for supporting virtuallyGhetto and most importantly I would like to say thank you to my readers. Thank you for your engagement whether that is a comment on my blog, a discussion on Twitter, an email describing a problem or just saying hi at a conference. Thank you to everyone who has shared interesting stories, challenges and unique use cases on how you use VMware products and continuing to help us improve our products. 2014 has been an amazing year and I look forward to all the exciting things coming in 2015 as well as continuing to share and contribute back to the community through my blog. If there are any topics that you would like to see me explore further or continue to explore next year, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I wish you a Happy Holidays tand have a fun and safe Happy New Years, see you all in 2015!

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VMware Product Managers on Twitter

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VMworld is a great event for customers to connect with VMware Product Managers to provide feedback on their current challenges, issues and feature requests for our current products as well as future roadmaps and directions. However, this should not be the only time a customer can directly engage with our product managers. Last week at VMworld, I found myself connecting numerous customers and account managers to the various product managers at VMware to ensure that their feedback was heard by the right person.

This was quite tough as I become the middle-man and potentially bottleneck. Looking back on the event, I realized it would have been nice if customers could directly reach out to the various product managers within their respective areas and not only during VMworld but throughout the year. This is where I think Social Media can be quite powerful and leveraging tools like Twitter, you can easily provide a way for customers (for those that use Twitter) to reach out to the various product managers. I knew there were a few VMware Product Managers that were on Twitter, but during the week of VMworld I came across a couple new ones that I had not known about such as my good buddy Greg Murrary who is the PM for Appliances, Logging Infrastructure and the Platform Services Controller.

I figure it might be useful to create a list of all VMware Product Managers & Technical Product Managers that are on Twitter and share that with the VMware Community so that you can reach out to these folks when you have any questions, feedback or requests. Do not be shy, these are very friendly folks and I know they definitely would love to engage the community even more and this is another way you can directly interact with them! If there are others, please leave a comment with your contact information.

I have also created a Twitter list called VMwareProductManagers if you wish to just follow all VMware Product Managers.

Name Twitter Handle Responsibility
Aaron Blasius AaronBlasius ESXi Hardware Enablement
Alan Renouf alanrenouf VMware Automation: CLI + SDK + API
Alex Jauch ajauch VMware Cloud on AWS
Antoan Arnaudov antoan_arnaudov vSphere Auditing + Events + Alarms + Performance Charts + Logging
Ben Meadowcroft BenMeadowcroft VVOL
Bo Dong dbo_vmw VCSA Migration + Install & Upgrade
Bo Fu tofubo Fusion
Brian Graf vBrianGraf Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) + Predictive DRS + Proactive HA
Dennis Lu dennisgoblu vSphere Web Client (Flex) + vSphere HTML5 Web Client (H5)
Forbes Guthrie forbesguthrie VMware Validated Design (VVD)
Greg Murray gregmmurray Photon OS + Appliance Management & VCSA
Karthik Narayan _karthiknarayan vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)
Matt Dreyer matt_dreyer VMware Cloud on AWS
Nakul Jamadagni jnacool vMotion + xVC-vMotion + Instant Clone
Narayan Bharadwaj nadubharadwaj VMware Cloud on AWS
Pat Lee patlee Horizon Air + Remote Experience Clients + 3D + Horizon FLEX + Fusion + Workstation
Rakesh Nair MynameisNair Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Ray Budavari rbudavari NSX
Roman Konarev RomanKonarev vSphere Content Library + vSphere HA
Sachin Thakkar sachin_t vCloud Air
Salil Suri SalilSuri ESXi Platform + ESXi Security + VMware Tools
Swaroop Dutta SwaroopvDutta Virtual SAN (vSAN)
Thomas Corfmat tcorfmat vRealize Automation
Venky Deshpande VMWNetworking NSX
Vishwa Srikaanth wishhva vCenter Server Performance + Scale
Yiting Jin YitingJin VMRC + Multi-vCenter Management + Fault Tolerance
Ziv Kalmanovich zivkal vSphere GPU Enablement