HTML5 – Page 2

Changing "Password will expire in X days" notification for Active Directory users in vSphere Web/H5 Client

11.17.2017 by William Lam // 1 Comment

When logging into the vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web (Flex) or H5 Client, one of the validation checks that is automatically performed by the server is to check the current users password expiry. If you account expiry is less than the current password expiry configuration, then you will see the yellow notification pop up at the top stating:

Password will expire in X days

This is definitely a helpful feature to have automatically built into the vSphere UI and the default expiry actually depends on the type of user logging into the system. This last part is sometimes confusing as folks mix up the default Single Sign-On User Expiry with the Active Directory user expiry which is completely different.

Single Sign-On Users

For SSO Domain (vsphere.local by default) users, the password expiry AND notification by default is 90 days. This can be configured in the vSphere Web Client under Administration->Single Sign-On->Configuration->Password Policy as shown in the screenshot below. For those wanting to automate this configuration, there is currently not an SSO Admin API, but there are some options, have a look at this blog post here.

Active Directory Users

If you are logging in as an Active Directory user, the password expiry notification by default is 30 days but the actual password expiry will obviously depend on your Active Directory system. If you want to change the expiry notification in case your expiry is not 30 days or you wish to notify sooner or later, this is actually controlled by the vSphere Web and H5 Client.

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How to audit vSphere Standalone VMRC or HTML5 VMRC connections?

07.11.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

An interesting question that came in last week from one of our TAMs was how to identify and audit Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC) logins from vSphere? The TAM was specifically interested in being able to correlate that a particular user had logged into the VMRC of a VM during a specific period of time. Luckily, this is easily retrievable through vCenter Servers's Event sub-system that stores information about everything that happens in your vSphere environment. The Events can be accessed using either the vSphere Web Client shown below or programmatically using the vSphere API which the UI is built on top of.

You can obviously filter your search in the UI and focus on a particular VM, but often times there can be dozens if not hundreds of "Events" generated for a given VM. I personally prefer to leverage Automation when needing to look for a specific type of Event and more importantly, you can further process the results to either send out reports or hook into other third party systems. Now that we know, "where" to find our data, the next thing is identifying the type of Event that is generated for a VMRC connection.

As of vSphere 5.5 Update 2b, the VMRC in the vSphere Web Client can be accessed in one of two ways: The new HTML5 VMRC by clicking onto the VM screenshot thumbnail or the Standalone VMRC by clicking on the link directly beneath the VM screenshot.

Each VMRC connection method will generate a unique vCenter Server Event. For HTML5 VMRC connections, the Event is called VmAcquiredMksTicketEvent and for Standalone VMRC connections, the Event is called VmAcquiredTicketEvent. As I mentioned earlier, the vCenter Server Event sub-system can be accessed using the vSphere API and you can find the complete list of Events documented here. To demonstrate the use of this particular vSphere API, below is a PowerCLI example using the Get-VIEvent cmdlet. My fellow colleague Alan Renouf has actually blogged about working with Events using PowerCLI which I will be adapting one of his examples for our use case.

We first retrieve the VM that we are interested in by running the following command (specify the name of your VM):

$vm = Get-VM -Name "VCSA-60u2"

To retrieve HTML5 VMRC connections, run the following PowerCLI command:

Get-VIEvent -Entity $vm | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmAcquiredMksTicketEvent"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, FullFormattedMessage | ft -wrap -AutoSize

Here is an example of what the output would look like

To retrieve Standalone VMRC connections, run the following PowerCLI command:

Get-VIEvent -Entity $vm | Where { $_.Gettype().Name -eq "VmAcquiredTicketEvent"} | Select CreatedTime, UserName, UserAgent, FullFormattedMessage | ft -wrap -AutoSize

Here is an example of what the output would look like:

How to bootstrap the VCSA using the ESXi Embedded Host Client?

12.22.2015 by William Lam // 5 Comments

In the past, I have written about various ways of "bootstrapping" vCenter Server (here and here) which can be useful for setting up greenfield vSphere deployments. This topic has always been of interest to me because it can be the most challenging to solve, especially when you only start out with a single ESXi host. Historically, these "bootstrapping" options have mostly been driven from a CLI standpoint which is not a bad thing when you think about it from an Automation standpoint and needing to replicate this a few dozen times. However, from a user experience point of view, it may not be as ideal, especially if this is an infrequent task. One of the other cool features of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (EHC) which recently had its v4 release is that it can be used to deploy Virtual Appliances stored in the OVF format.

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