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

03.09.2015 by William Lam // 9 Comments

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.

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:

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 😉

Multiple VMDKs in VCSA 6.0?

03.09.2015 by William Lam // 10 Comments

One thing you might notice after deploying the new VCSA 6.0 is that it now includes 11 VMDKs. If you are like me, you are probably asking why are there so many? If you look at past releases of the VCSA, it only contained two VMDKS. The first disk was used for both the OS and the various VMware applications like vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, etc. and the second disk was where all the application data was stored such as the VCDB, SSODB, Logs, etc.

There were several challenges with this design, one issue was that you could not easily increase the disk capacity for a particular application component. If you needed more storage for the VCDB but not for your logs or other applications, you had no choice but to increase the entire volume. In fact, this was actually a pretty painful process because a logical volume manager (LVM) was also not used. This meant that you needed to stop the vCenter Server service, add a new disk, format it and then copy all the data from the old volume to the new. Another problem with the old design is that you can not apply Storage QoS on important data such as the VCDB which you may want on a faster tier of storage or putting your Log data on slower and cheaper tier of storage by leveraging something like VM Storage Policies which works on a per VMDK basis.

For these reasons, VCSA 6.0 is now comprised of 11 individual VMDKs as seen in the screenshot below.

Here is a useful table that I have created which provides the mappings of each of the VDMKs to their respective functions.

Disk	Size	Purpose	Mount Point
VMDK1	12GB	/ and Boot	/ and /boot
VMDK2	1.2GB	Temp Mount	/tmp/mount
VMDK3	25GB	Swap	SWAP
VMDK4	25GB	Core	/storage/core
VMDK5	10GB	Log	/storage/log
VMDK6	10GB	DB	/storage/db
VMDK7	5GB	DBLog	/storage/dblog
VMDK8	10GB	SEAT (Stats Events and Tasks)	/storage/seat
VMDK9	1GB	NetDumper	/storage/netdump
VMDK10	10GB	AutoDeploy	/storage/autodeploy
VMDK11	5GB	Inventory Service	/storage/invsvc

In addition, increasing disk capacity for a particular VMDK has been greatly simplified as the VCSA 6.0 now uses LVM to manage each of the partitions. You can now, on the fly increase disk space for a particular volume while the vCenter Server is still running and the changes will go live immediately. You can refer to this article here for the process as it is a simple two step process.

Here are some useful commands to get more details of the filesystem structure in the new VCSA.

lsblk

lsscsi

How to configure SMP-FT using Nested ESXi in vSphere 6?

03.06.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Symmetric Multi-Processing Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) has been a long-awaited feature by many VMware customers. With the release of vSphere 6.0, the SMP-FT capability is now finally available and if you want to try out this new feature and see how it works from a "functional" perspective, you can easily do so by running it in a Nested ESXi environment. SMP-FT no longer uses the "record/replay" capability like its younger brother Uniprocessing Fault Tolerance (UP-FT). Instead, SMP-FT now uses a new Fast Checkpointing technique which not only improves the overall performance of its predecessor but also greatly simplifies and reduces additional configurations when running in a Nested ESXi environment.

Disclaimer: Running SMP-FT in a Nested ESXi environment does not replace or substitute actual testing of physical hardware. For any type of performance testing, please test SMP-FT using real hardware.

Requirements:

pESXi host running either ESXi 5.5 or 6.0
vCenter Server 6.0
2 x Nested ESXi VMs running ESXi 6.0 (vHW9+)
Shared storage for the Nested ESXi VMs

Instructions:

Step 1 - Created a Nested ESXi VM using guestOS type "ESXi 5.5/6.0 or later". You will need at least 2 vCPU or greater, 4GB of memory or greater for the installation of ESXi and most importantly, a VMXNET3 network adapter. The reason a VMXNET3 adapter is required is that SMP-FT has a requirement for 10Gbit network connection and the VMXNET3 driver can simulate a 10Gbit connection for a Nested ESXi VM. For further instructions on creating a Nested ESXi VM, please take a look at this article. If you are unable to add VMXNET3 adapter, you may need to first change the guestOS type to "Other 64-bit", add the adapter and then change the guestOS type back.

Step 2 - Install ESXi 6.0 on the Nested ESXi VM and ensure you also have a vCenter Server 6.0 deployed if you have not done so already and add your Nested ESXi instances to a new vSphere Cluster which has vSphere HA enabled.

Step 3 - You will need to enable both vMotion and Fault Tolerance traffic type for the VMkernel interface that you wish to run FT traffic across.

Step 4 - At this point, you can create a real or dummy VM and power it on. Once you have the powered on VM, you can now enable either UP-FT or SMP-FT by right clicking and selecting "Enable Fault Tolerance".

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have successfully enabled FT on a VM with 4vCPU running inside of a Nested ESXi VM, how cool is that!? Hopefully this will help you get more familiar with the new SMP-FT feature when you are ready to give it a real spin on real hardware 🙂

Note: Intel Sandy Bridge is recommended when using SMP-FT (real physical hardware) but if you have older CPUs, you enable "Legacy FT" mode by adding the following VM Advanced Setting "vm.uselegacyft" to the VM you are enabling FT on.