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How to customize the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client login UI?

02.17.2015 by William Lam // 35 Comments

A common feature request that I hear from customers from time to time is the ability to customize the login screen for the vSphere Web Client. Going beyond just aesthetics such as adding an organizations logo or colors, it is often a mandatory requirement for some organizations to display a security or warning banner to the users prior to logging in. In prior releases of vSphere, the login page of the vSphere Web Client (which is actually from vCenter Single Sign-On service) was written in Flash which meant that it was impossible to change without recompiling the source code.

In vSphere 6.0 (yes, vSphere 6.0 is required), the vCenter Single Sign-On login page is now written using regular HTML and CSS. This means you can actually now customize the login page with your own logos, colors or text that you wish to display to your end users. Not only can you customize the login for vCenter Server but you can also do the same for vRealize Automation Center as long as you are using the latest version of the Platform Services Controller which now provides other services in addition to vCenter Single Sign-On.

UPDATE (07/14/16): For vSphere 6.0 Update 2 environments, please follow the instructions here as there have been some minor changes. This article is only applicable for vSphere 6.0 and vSphere 6.0 Update 1 environments.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, if you decide to enable this, please use at your own risk and ensure you backup all original files in case you need revert back to the original configurations.

There are two specific files that you will want to take a look at, the first is unpentry.jsp which controls the look and feel of the actual login page and the second is login.css which controls the stylesheet for the login page. If you wish to include your own images including gifs (which I did not expect would work), there is a img directory that you can reference. Below are the paths to these configuration files for both a Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA 6.0.

Windows vCenter Server 6.0 / 6.0u1

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\unpentry.jsp
C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\resources\css\login.css
C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\resources\img

VCSA 6.0 / 6.0u1

/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/unpentry.jsp
/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/resources/css/login.css
/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/resources/img

Note: It is highly recommended that you backup all original files before making edits so you can easily revert to the original configuration. If you are only updating the image to figure out layout and placement, you may notice changes are not reflected when you refresh the vSphere Web Client. The reason for this is that the image is only refreshed when the configuration files (.jsp) is updated. You can easily do this by simply opening it up and then saving it without making changes. I found this was the quickest way to force a reload of an updated image that has been uploaded.

I figure it might be cool to create a couple of vSphere Web Client "themes" for some of my buddies like Rawlinson Rivera, Duncan Epping, Alan Renouf, Mike Foley and Cormac Hogan. I hope Rawlinson likes his theme as I know how big of a fan he is 😉 I have also created a Github repo customize-vsphere-web-client-6.0 where you can find all the themes below. Feel free to create your own and contribute them back to the community.

Rawlinson Rivera Theme -

Duncan Epping Theme -

Alan Renouf Theme -

Mike Foley Theme -

Cormac Hogan Theme -

Here is an additional bonus theme as I could not leave out my good buddy CaptainVSAN!

I am looking forwarding to see what others come up with in terms of their own vSphere Web Client themes and be sure to share them back by either posting back here or better yet, contributing to the Github repository.

Image Sources:

http://www.twitterevolutions.com/bgs/justin-bieber-2.jpg
http://s1174.photobucket.com/user/D-A-C-20/media/Holland%20EUIV/Holland.png.html
http://www.chrisschofield.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PowerCLIman.jpg
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view6/2662404/you-didnt-say-the-magic-word-o.gif

Cool Docker Container for VMware Utilities

02.17.2015 by William Lam // 11 Comments

Last week during lunch I learned about a cool little project that my colleague Alan Renouf was working on in his spare time at night. He was interested in learning more about Docker and thought the best way to learn about something new was by using it, which is normally how I learn as well. He came up with a nifty idea to create a Docker Image that would house a bunch of useful VMware tools which included several VMware open source projects as well.

UPDATE (11/23/16) - The Docker Container has now been updated with all the latest vSphere 6.5 SDK/CLI/Tools. We also plan to make this new version of the Docker Image available on Docker Hub, so stay tuned for those details shortly.

Some customers in the past have built similar offerings by using a free VMware Appliance called vMA (vSphere Management Assistance). vMA is nothing more than a stripped down version of SLES that has the vSphere CLI (vCLI) pre-installed. In my opinion, vMA is pretty limited and you can not install additional packages without voiding official support. Even if you decide to ignore support and install custom packages, I have often seen this break existing dependencies. When I talk to customers about their use of vMA, most used it because it was just there, but the majority prefer to use their own harden distribution of Linux and install their own admin utilities and packages which may also include non-VMware tools.

I personally have no problem building my own VM appliance that contains the various VMware packages, utilities and scripts that I use on a daily basis. However, not everyone is comfortable with this idea. Wow could this be further simplified and automated? Well, enter vmware-utils a Docker Image that allows you to automatically build a new image that contains some of the most popular and widely used VMware Utilities.

I wanted to enhance the awesome work that Alan had done with couple more VMware open source tools that I thought might be useful to VMware Administrators, which I actually wrote about here in my List of VMware CLIs, SDKS and DevOps Tools article. I have already submitted a pull request for my changes here. If there are other tools or packages you think that are useful and wish to contribute back, feel free to clone the repository and submit a pull request!

The latest vmware-utils now contains the following:

vSphere CLI 6.5
PowerCLI Core 1.0
vSphere Management SDK 6.5
vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5
vSphere SDK for Ruby (rbvmomi)
vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi)
vSphere Automation SDK for Ruby 6.5
vSphere Automation SDK for Python 6.5
vSphere Automation SDK for Perl 6.5
vSphere Automation SDK for Java 6.5
VSAN Management SDK for Ruby 6.5
VSAN Management SDK for Python 6.5
VSAN Management SDK for Java 6.5
VSAN Management SDK for Perl 6.5
Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.5
OVFTool 4.2
PowerCLI Community Repository
PowerCLI Core Docker Container Samples
William Lam's vGhetto Script Repository
Pyvmomi Community Samples
Docker Client v1.12.3
Docker Compose v1.8.1

For those of you who are new to Docker, a great way to quickly get started is by using an awesome tool called boot2docker which allows you to run Docker Containers on either a Windows or Mac OS X system. This also helps remove any barriers if you do not want to setup a Linux machine to get Docker of if you are like me, running on Mac OS X and rather not have to spin up a VM just to use Docker. Below are the steps on getting boot2docker working and building your own vmware-utils Docker Image.

Step 1 - Download the Docker Client for your specific OS (Windows, Linux or Mac OS X)

Step 2 - Take a look at the vmware-utils README, I spent some time updating it to make it more consumable for new users of Docker and follow the "How" section which will have you download the 4 VMware utilities as well as the vmware-utils DockerFile which we will need to build the Docker Container.

Step 3 - Create a directory and place all files into that directory. In this example, I have called the directory "vmware-utils".

Step 3 - We are now ready to build our vmware-utils Docker Image. Change into the "vmware-utils" directory that contains the files you downloaded earlier we will need to specify a "tag" for our image as part of the build command. In this example, I have called my image "lamw/vmware-utils" and to start the build process run the following command:

docker build -t lamw/vmware-utils .

Step 4 - The build itself may take some time depending on the speed of your internet connection. You will know when it has successfully completed when it states "Successfully built X" where X will be some unique ID as seen in the screenshot below.

Step 5 - Once the Docker Image has finished building, you can then run and connect to the Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it lamw/vmware-utils

At this point, you are now logged into the vmware-utils Docker Container that you have just built! It contains all the VMware Utilities that I have listed earlier and for more details on what has been installed and the location of the utilities, take a look at the vmware-utils Github documentation. If there are other tools you would like to see, feel free to contribute back by cloning the repository and submitting a pull request. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and providing a more dynamic way of creating a vMA-like experience without the current limitations. Keep up the awesome work Alan!

Quick Tip - How to enable memory overcommitment in VMware Fusion?

02.14.2015 by William Lam // 20 Comments

There was an interesting internal thread that I came across yesterday where someone was asking if VMware Fusion supported memory overcommitment like VMware Workstation? In VMware Workstation, memory overcommitment can be adjusted by going to Edit->Preferences->Memory which provides three different options as shown in the screenshot below. This setting specifies the percentage of memory that would be reserved from the physical host memory for each Virtual Machine.

These options map to the following % of host memory reservation:

Option	% of Host Memory Reserved Per VM
Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM	100
Allow some virtual memory to be swapped	50
Allow most virtual memory to be swapped	25

Disclaimer: Be aware, that default safe guards have been put in place to ensure optimal VM performance. If you decide to change these settings and allow memory overcommitment, it can potentially degrade performance of both your VMs as well as host system. Make sure you understand the changes before applying them.

You can also specify a custom value by editing the VMware Workstation configuration file located in: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini and modifying or adding the following property:

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = P

where P is the percentage of configured VM memory that should fit into the host memory. The smallest value that P can be is 1. Below is a screenshot of a 32GB VM running on a Macbook Air with latest version of Fusion (8.5.3) which only has 8GB of physical memory and the value that I had used for this demonstration is 1.

Going back to VMware Fusion, memory overcommitment is also possible but the option to configure it is not available in the VMware Fusion UI. You will need to add the above setting into the VMware Fusion configuration file located in /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/config which does not exist by default. You will need to restart Fusion/Workstation for the change to go into effect.

In addition to the change, if you do decide to overcommit your memory, it was also mentioned that you may also want to disable Hard Disk buffering for optimal performance. You can make this change in the Advanced Settings of the the VM as seen in the screenshot below.

You can also just add the following property to the Virtual Machine's VMX configuration file:

hard-disk.hostBuffer = "disabled"

Memory commitment can be a wonderful tool, especially for lab environments. If you combine this with SSD storage and if swapping does occur, the impact may be acceptable so that you can run a few more VMs. Thanks to Regis Duchesne & Jesse Pool for sharing this handy tidbit!