WilliamLam.com

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client

by // 7 Comments

After publishing an article about the vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature, I received question from a reader asking about the keyboard shortcuts that were available as part of the legacy vSphere C# Client. The reader really enjoyed these shortcuts as a way to quickly navigate between the various inventories and was wondering if similar keyboard shortcuts existed for the new vSphere Web Client? I was not able to find anything in our documentation and decided to reach out to our UE (User Experience) folks to see if they could assist.

Though we do not have every single keyboard shortcut that was available from the legacy vSphere C# Client, we actually do have quite a few and this somehow must have gotten missed during documentation (I have filed documentation bug on this). In talking to our UE folks, some of the challenges in adding the keyboard shortcuts was to find shortcuts that have not already been taken by either a web browser (vSphere Web Client is a browser application) or the Operating System used to connect to the vSphere Web Client. It was also very important if new shortcuts were added, that it would be easy to understand. As you can see this was not a trivial task at all.

The screenshot below provides a quick overview of the available keyboard shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client. Take a look at the table below for a more detailed break down of each keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Combination Action
Ctrl+Alt+s
 Quick Search
Ctrl+Alt+Home OR Ctrl+Alt+1
 Home Screen
Ctrl+Alt+2
 Virtual Infrastructure Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+3
 Hosts and Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+4
 VMs and Templates Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+5
 Datastores and Datastore Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+6
 Networking Inventory

I was able to verify these shortcuts on both a Mac OS X system as well as a on Windows. This is something I definitely will be bookmark as a useful reference. If there are other keyboard shortcuts that you have grown to rely on in the legacy vSphere C# Client and would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it gets to our UE folks.

Quick Tip - vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature

by // 5 Comments

A customer who was also a former colleague of mines reached out to me a few days ago asking about a feature request that he would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, which is the ability to view the recent history of inventory objects that he had navigated through. He explained that using the Inventory Navigator on the left pane of the vSphere Web Client, you can only go back to the previous inventory object.

The feature he was looking for is similar to the history feature of a web browser where you can view your recently visited websites. I know for new users of the vSphere Web Client, this is a must have feature as you are getting familiar with the new Web Client and the Inventory Navigator. This feature was actually something I and others within VMware pushed hard for while vSphere 5.1 was still in development and I knew that this feature (also known as breadcrumb) was available.

However, it might not have been obvious on where to access the recent history feature. At the very top of the Inventory Navigator, there is a tiny drop down arrow next to the selected inventory object. If you click on that, you will get a list of your recently visited inventory objects.

Once I provided the screenshot, it was exactly what he was looking for. This really comes in handy when you are jumping around and with a single click, you can easily navigate back to a previous object.

Did you know that VMware Host Profile is extensible by 3rd Parties?

by // 1 Comment

Managing ESXi host configurations can be challenging and the potential risk for configuration drift between the running environment and the set of configuration scripts or worse, manual configuration is quite high. On top of that, how do you ensure proper compliance of all your ESXi host configurations in your environment and easily prove that in an internal or security audit?

This is where VMware Host Profile can help which allows administrators to capture the running configurations of an ESXi host and automatically creating a template (Host Profile) that can then be applied across new or existing ESXi hosts. By leveraging Host Profile, administrators can ensure that all their ESXi host configurations are always consistent and configuration drifts can easily be prevented through automatic compliance checks.

Recently, while searching for something on VMware's HCL website, I accidentally stumbled onto what appears to be 3rd party Host Profiles? There were only two listed, one from Brocade for managing and configuring Brocade storage adapters and the other from Dell for managing and configuring Dell's EqualLogic MEM (Multipathing Extension Module). I was actually quite surprise to learn about these custom 3rd party Host Profiles. In doing a bit of digging and research it turns out that VMware Host Profile are in fact extensible by design, which was something new to me.

Note: For a technical overview of Host Profile, you can take a look at this whitepaper here. 

Host Profile Architecture

Host Profile was first introduced with the release of vSphere 4.1 and the brain of the system is known as the Host Profile Engine which was part of the vCenter Server. In vSphere 5.0, Host Profile was re-architected and the Host Profile Engine was moved into the ESXi host which allowed for Host Profile Plugins to be added to an ESXi Image and expose new Host Profiles through the Host Profile Engine.

A Host Profile is actually a hierarchical composition of multiple sub-profiles and policies. Each policy defines a set of parameters that a user can select from and apply to an ESXi host. For instance, the default VMware Host Profile is composed up of 12 individual sub-profiles: authentication, datetime, firewall, memory, network, option, security, service, storage, userAccount and userGroupAccount.

With this new re-architecutre, Host Profile can be extended by 3rd party partners/vendors to create custom Host Profile Plugins to expose vendor specific hardware or software configurations and made available through a common Host Profile API/UI for customers to consume.

Host Profile Extensibility Options

To build a Host Profile Plugin, you will need to use the Host Profile SDK which is only available as part of VMware TAP (Technology Alliance Partner) Program. A Host Profile Plugin basically wraps the actual configuration work and can be backed by one of three ways:

  1. CIM Provider using the CIM SDK
  2. ESXCLI plugins
  3. Userworld binaries

As you can see, creating a Host Profile Plugin is quite flexible and can be exposed through several mechanisms. The most shocking discovery that I found was the lack of 3rd party vendor Host Profiles that exists today, especially from the big server hardware vendors. Coming from a Systems Administrator background, I would loved to have been able to configure and manage my server's firmware, BIOS, out-of-band management (iLO/DRAC), etc. through either a custom ESXCLI plugin or Host Profile Plugin. This would really benefit customers from having to manage configurations using multiple tools and allowing them centralize their management including compliance capabilities all from a single interface.

Hopefully this was an educational post for everyone and if you are a customer and would like to see certain functionality exposed by our 3rd party partners, feel free to leave a message and perhaps one of them may consider adding a custom Host Profile Plugin 🙂