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vSphere Web Client

Why does Deploy OVF Template operation show vpxd-extension-[uuid]?

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A question that I had received awhile ago from a customer was how to identify the specific user(s) who have deployed an OVF/OVA? Customers can easily do this by leveraging vCenter Serve Events, which are extremely rich with information that can help answer this and many other questions you might have in your vSphere enviornment.


The first challenge that you will find is that an OVF/OVA import operation is mapped to a generic vCenter TaskEvent, which will require some additional filtering. Secondly, depending on the method that was used to deploy the OVF/OVA such as the vSphere UI or using Automation tools like OVFTool or PowerCLI, you will also slightly diffrent behaviors in terms of the vCenter Server Events that are emitted.

If you deploy an OVF/OVA using the vSphere UI, you may have noticed there are actually two vCenter tasks which are displayed and running simultaneously as shown in the screenshot above. The first task is called "Import OVF package" and you will see that this task is associated with the actual user who initiated the import. The second task called "Deploy OVF template" is then associated with a vCenter system account that handles the actual deployment which will show up with a vpxd-extension-[uuid] username. This occurs because the user who is performing the import is not interacting directly with with vCenter Server, but rather through the vSphere UI which uses a system account to then communicate the operation to vCenter Server.

For this reason, when an OVF/OVA is imported through the vSphere UI, you will need to look at the TaskEvent and filter for the initial import operation. If an OVF/OVA is imported using the vSphere API using something like OVFTool, PowerCLI or any other vSphere SDK, then you will only see the Deploy OVF Template operation and the user associated with that operation is the person who initiated the import.

Using PowerCLI and the Get-VIEvent cmdlet, we can easily filter out these two types of TaskEvents.

Get-VIEvent | where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.FullFormattedMessage -eq "Task: Import OVF package"}

Get-VIEvent | where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.FullFormattedMessage -eq "Task: Import OVF package"}

Updated Character Limits for vSphere Objects

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I recently saw a question asking about the character limit for the various vSphere Inventory Objects like a Datacenter or Virtual Machine as an example. I was not aware of anything formally documented, but I did come across this 2018 blog post by fellow colleague Todd Simmons, who did some testing with vSphere 6.7 and shared his initial results.


I was curious myself on whether these limits have changed but I also noticed there were many other vSphere Objects that were not tested. I figured this would be an interesting exercise to re-evaluate against the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release and using some PowerShell code like the following to help:

$str = "w" * 80

Below are my findings which have been verified using the vSphere UI and I have also expanded the object list to cover more recent solutions such as vSphere with Tanzu.

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Adding a customized notification banner in the vSphere UI

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I was recently reminded of an old vCenter Server feature called Message of the Day (MOTD) that I had used quite extensively when I was a customer to easily communicate upcoming patch windows, downtime, updates and other interesting news to my internal users. Back in the day, the vSphere UI was known as the VI Client (C# Client or Thick Client) and once the MOTD is configured, users logging in would see this this custom notification banner across their UI Client.

It has been ages since I had used vCenter's MOTD feature but after sharing this tidbit on Twitter yesterday, I found a mix of folks that were still using this awesome feature including a VMware Cloud on AWS use case to that helped them easily identify a particular environments to users who was just learning about this feature for the first time.

In addition to bringing some awareness to this oldie but goodie feature of vCenter Server, I also wanted to share some details on how you might automate this as I had a few questions about this on Twitter.

Here is a screenshot of my vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment which has been configured with an MOTD and you can see that it can also properly render emojis, so you can certainly have some fun here 🙂


To configure an MOTD, click on the vCenter Server inventory object and then navigate to Configure->Settings->Message of Day and set or disable the message.


For those that wish to configure the MOTD programmatically, you can do so using the vSphere API with your favorite vSphere SDK of your choice including PowerCLI. You will need to use the UpdateServiceMessage() method which is part of the SessionManager object.

If you wish to view or check whether an MOTD is configured, the following PowerCLI snippet can be used:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name vpxd.motd | select Value

However, to configure the MOTD, you can NOT use the Set-AdvancedSetting cmdlet as the advanced setting is a read only value and you must use the vSphere API directly.

Using PowerCLI, here is how to view the current MOTD:

$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.Message

Using PowerCLI, here is how to update/change the MOTD:

$motd = "🚨This is William Lam's environment, it is NOT supported. Use at your own risk 😎"
$sm = Get-View $global:DefaultVIServer.ExtensionData.Content.SessionManager
$sm.UpdateServiceMessage($motd)

Quick Tip - How to disable the vCenter Server Update Notification banner?

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I received this question on Twitter from Andreas asking the following:

When a new vCenter Server update is available, a notification banner is automatically displayed in the vSphere UI. This functionality was introduced as part of vSphere 7.0 and part of the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) capability. This is a very useful feature since administrators spend most of their time in the vSphere UI and when new update was available, it would only be displayed in the VAMI UI, which most folks were not logging into on a regular basis.


Today, the update notification banner is always displayed and there is no way to temporarily disable it. This can be annoying if you do not intend to update your vCenter Server immediately and I assume this is why Andreas was asking about either postponing or disabling the notification all together.

Currently, the only way I am aware of for disabling this notification is to actually disable the vCenter Server Life-Cycle Manager Remote Plugin itself. You can do this by navigating to Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and then selecting "vCenter Server Life-cycle Manager" and click on the Disable button. You can refresh the webpage or logout and you should no longer see the notification banner.

Disclaimer: By disabling the vCLM plugin, you are disabling more than just the banner but all vCenter vLCM functionality including Interop and Update Planner capabilities. If these are things you require, do not disable the plugin.


I can certainly see a nice feature enhancement in the future where vLCM notifications can be postponed or deferred to a later date. I will share this blog post and feedback with the vLCM PM for consideration.

Adobe Flash is going away, is your VMware environment and IT Organization ready for it?

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Hopefully this news should not come as a surprise to anyone but at the end of this year (December 31, 2020), Adobe and all mainstream web browsers will remove Flash functionality preventing users from interacting with any Flash-based web applications. This will also impact usage of VMware products that still uses Flash such as older versions of vSphere with the vSphere Flash Web Client or vCloud Director with their Flash-based Tenant UI as an example.


The large majority of VMware customers have already migrated off to newer versions of VMware products that no longer rely on Flash and this announcement will be a no-op for them. However, the reality is that not every customer has been able to meet this deadline for one reason or another will still have VMware products running in their Production environment that uses Flash even after the official end of life.

For these customers, it is really important to understand what are some of the implications and considerations to be aware of leading up to end of the year.

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Creating vCenter Alarms based on Task Events such as Folder creation

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The vCenter Server Events sub-system is an incredibly rich and powerful interface that enables customers to monitor, alert and even trigger additional actions based on a particular event. One such example that I have written about before is to key off of a VM provisioned event and automatically apply security hardening settings when the VM is created or cloned. This can be useful if customers are not taking advantage of VM Templates or if a VI Admins manually creates a VM from scratch, you can still ensure you have a compliant VM deployment through the use of Automation. You can either poll for the VM created event and then execute a script as shown in this example or you can automatically trigger a remote action by generating an SNMP trap when the event actually occurs.

The possibilities are truly endless on what you can do with vCenter Events and for the complete list of all Event types, you can refer to the vSphere API documentation here. One thing to be aware of is that not every operation within vCenter Server generates an Event, one example of this is when a Folder object is created or deleted. You can use vCenter Server Tasks sub-system to query for this info but there is not a respective vCenter Event that you can key off of to generate an Alarm for example. This was something I had noticed myself and assumed it was a limitation of the platform or feature teams that publish VC Events.

Recently, this question came up again from a customer who was looking for a way to trigger an alarm every time a VM Folder was created. I took another look at this and came to learn about a more generic type of Event that can be used to create an Alarm for such use cases where a native VC Event may not exists called a Task Event.

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