Search Results for: vsphere events

vSphere Tag Attach/Detach events now in VMware Cloud on AWS

03.05.2019 by William Lam // 4 Comments

The underlying products (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) that run within VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) are constantly being improved with new capabilities and enhancements. As a service, VMC is updated more frequently than a traditional on-premise environment and one huge benefit for our customers is that they get to access all the latest and greatest features of the platform!

Yesterday, I came to learn about some improvements that we had made to our vSphere Tagging infrastructure to start publishing vCenter Server Events for when a vSphere Tag is attached or detached from an inventory object such as a Virtual Machine. This has been a frequently requested feature by our customers, especially for auditing purposes and this also enables the ability to perform additional actions through the use of a vCenter Alarm.

UPDATE (10/13/20) - vSphere 7.0 Update 1 now includes vCenter Events for both vSphere Tag Attach/Detach operations. For complete list of out of the box vCenter Server Events, you can refer to this Github repo.

In the vSphere UI for a VMC vCenter Server, you can now see these new tagging events by selecting the vCenter Server inventory object and then go to Monitor->Events and filter by "attached tag" or "detached tag".

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vSphere 6.5b prevents vSphere Web Client logins for users w/o VC permissions

03.14.2017 by William Lam // 8 Comments

A patch update was just released for vCenter Server 6.5, dubbed vSphere 6.5b. While glancing through the release notes, I caught one interesting "resolved issue" which I thought was worth sharing.

Users with no vCenter Server permissions can log in to the vSphere Web Client

Users without permissions can log in to the vSphere Web Client. Users can click the menu options, but no inventory is displayed.

Users with no permissions can no longer log in to the vSphere Web Client.

To enable the login, set the allow.user.without.permissions.login = true property in the webclient.properties file.

This particular behavior has been something that has confused a few customers and has been asked about since the introduction of vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) service. The issue or rather the confusion is that prior to the SSO service, vCenter Server handled both authentication as well as authorization.

With SSO, authentication was no longer being handled by vCenter Server and this meant that even if you had no permissions in vCenter Server but you could authenticate to SSO (especially common when Active Directory is configured), you would still be allowed to login to the vSphere Web/H5 Client.

Although vCenter Server would does the right thing and does not display any inventory if you do not have any permissions, it was still not a desired behavior in addition to the confusion it caused. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have changed this default behavior by disallowing logins to the vSphere Web/H5 Client if a user has no VC permissions. Below is the message you will receive if you try to login without VC permissions.

If you wish to revert to the original behavior, you can do so by simply adding the allow.user.without.permissions.login = true setting into the vSphere Web/H5 Client configuration file (webclient.properties) and restart the vSphere Web/H5 Client service. I think many of our customers will appreciate this fix as well as the new default behavior!

Auditing vSphere Datastore activities (Download, Upload, Copy, Move, Rename and Delete)

04.18.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

What feels like a weekly response, vCenter Server Events, should always be your initial starting point in helping you understand the Who, What and When for something occurring within your vSphere environment. There are over 2K+ events that are published out of the box from vCenter Server with hundreds more from 2nd and 3rd party solutions that integrate with vCenter Server.

Combine vCenter Server Events with the power of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), you now have a powerful Event-Driven Automation solution that can solve literally a limitless number of use cases, many of which have been shared by existing users found in this document HERE.

Today, I had received a question about auditing customers vSphere Datastore activities and identifying when someone has manually downloaded a Virtual Machine Virtual Disk (VMDK)?

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