vSphere Web Client

An update on how to retrieve useful information from a vSphere login?

11.07.2016 by William Lam // 4 Comments

There was an internal Socialcast question today in which the answer could be found in my how to identify the origin of a vSphere login article. After responding to the question, I had realized that I wrote that article almost 6 years ago and what is even more crazy is that it is still very applicable today. The article explains how you can identify a vSphere login by enabling the "trivial" logging option in vCenter Server (extremely verbose, so please use with caution). Once enabled, you can go through the vpxd.log file and find things about a user login such as the the IP Address of the client as well as the type of vSphere interface they had used to login to whether that is using the vSphere C# Client or PowerCLI for example. Although this extracted information can be very useful, the process to retrieve this is not very ideal, especially having to increase your vCenter Server logging verbosity to the extreme which can force other more critical log events to roll over.

Given that this article written back when vSphere 4.1 was still the current release, I figure I should give the process another look to see if there was a better method in retrieving this information. While quickly browsing around the SessionManager object and specifically the UserSession property, I noticed there have been quite a few enhancements that were introduced in vSphere 5.1. It looks like you can now easily retrieve things like the User Agent, IP Address of the client as well as the number of API invocations for anyone who is currently logged into a given vSphere environment. Perhaps someone internally saw my blog post and thought it would be useful to add these properties directly into the vSphere API rather than poking around in the verbose logs 😀

To exercise these new vSphere APIs, I have create a quick PowerCLI function called Get-vSphereLogins The script will iterate through all currently logged in vSphere sessions and provide the following output: Username, IP Address, API Count & Login Time. It also excludes the current session initiating the query as well as any of the VC Extension logins. Here is a screenshot of my environment using several different vSphere API interfaces to login to my vSphere environment:

With the information above, not only can you tell who is logging in but also where (IP Address) and most importantly how (User Agent) they are logging in. One thing to be aware of is that the User Agent is not always populated and even if it is, it may not provide you with enough information on the specific interface a given user is logging in from. For example, it looks like a script written using the vSphere SDK for Python does not actually set the User Agent, so it is empty.

Here is an updated table using some of the latest vSphere interfaces to log into a vSphere 6.0 Update 2 environment and their respective observed User Agents:

Interface	User Agent
vSphere C# Client	VMware vSphere Client/6.0.0
vSphere Web Client	VMware vim-java 1.0
vSphere MOB	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36
PowerCLI	PowerCLI/6.5.0
vSphere SDK for Perl	VI Perl
vSphere SDK for Ruby (rbvmomi)	Ruby
vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi)	None

Note: In vSphere 6.5, the User Agent that is returned for the vSphere Web Client session looks to be using web-client/6.5.0

Finally, saving the best for last. The VMware Engineer(s) not only added these new properties into the vSphere API, but they have also made them readily available using the vSphere Web Client. To view all the session information, navigate to your vCenter Server instance and under Manage->Sessions you can get the exact same view as using the vSphere API. By default, the IP Address, User Agent & API Invocations are hidden by default. You just need to right click on the table header and add those additional field as shown in the screenshot below.

Longer term, it would be great to see that each of the "official" VMware CLI/SDKs as well as other interfaces can uniquely identify themselves with a well defined string. This not only helps with understanding the types of tools customers are using but also helps with any types of internal audits customers may require. If you think this would be useful to have, please feel free to leave a comment or any other things you feel would be useful to include.

Automating the import of vCenter Server 6.x root certificate

07.27.2016 by William Lam // 14 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, you can now easily import your vCenter Server's trusted root CA certificate onto your client desktop by simply downloading it from the vCenter Server's landing page as shown in the screenshot below. Michael White had also recently wrote about this topic here which includes a step by step walk through.

Several weeks back I was working on an internal project which required the vCenter Server's root certificate. I was already aware of this interface and had written a quick and dirty script to automate the process of downloading and importing the certificate to the system I was working on. To be honest, I did not think much of the script after I wrote it. It was just recently that Alan Renouf, who was also involved in the project mentioned that it might be worth sharing the script as others might also find it useful. I thought that was a good idea and re-factored the code a bit since it was being used in a slightly different context. While doing so, I also created an equivalent PowerShell sample since the original script was meant to run on either a Mac OS X or Linux platform.

With that, I have created a simple shell script called import-vcrootcertificate.sh which can run on either Mac OS X or Linux system and a PowerShell script called Import-VCRootCertificate.ps1

Both scripts are pretty easy to use, they accept a single command-line argument which is the Hostname/IP Address of the vCenter Server that you wish to import the root certificate from. Both scripts ere able to detect if the vCenter Server is Windows or the VCSA since they have a slightly different URL to the root certificate before performing the import. Since the script will need access to your certificate store, you will need to run the scripts using a privileged account.

Here is a screenshot of running the PowerShell script:

Here is a screenshot of running the shell script:

Quick Tip - How to disable the landing page for vCenter Server 5.x & 6.x?

07.25.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The question of wanting to disable the default landing page for the vCenter Server is one that comes up infrequently. In fact, I probably see this maybe once or twice a year. However, when it does come up, it usually revolves around two topics: some sort of security risk and limiting users from obtaining software provided through these landing pages. In both case, simply disabling these landing pages will not solve either of these perceived issues.

I generally find these landing pages quite useful as they provide links to software downloads such as our legacy vSphere C# Client, SDK documentation as well as links to other interfaces to vCenter Server like the vSphere Web Client login, the datastore browser or the vSphere MOB. All of this information can be obtained through other official channels, so simply disabling this page does not really prevent users from downloading this content or accessing these interfaces.

On the second topic around security (which by no means am I an expert in), some customers feel that simply removing these default landing pages would some how prevent a security risk because a version of the software is no longer listed on that page? This is what some folks would call security through obscurity which just does not work. There are many different ways of identifying a version of vCenter Server and some of its components as well checking if the service is running. Simply removing these pages does little to nothing from stopping someone from retrieving this information using other methods. Instead, users should really be focusing how they are implementing security both in the software as well as the policies and processes they have in place which hopefully are inline with modern security practices.

In fact, by disabling some of these pages, you might even be hurting your overall customer experience depending on their familiarity with vCenter Server.

In any case, for those that are still inclined to disable these pages, below are the instructions on how to disable the various landing pages as I have not really seen this documented anywhere. The solution is actually quite simple which is to just rename the index files to something else which will prevent them from being loaded by the webserver.

Landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Tomcat landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/tomcat/webapps/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp

Landing page for vCenter Server 6.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Landing page for Platform Services Controll (vSphere 6.x)

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/index.jsp