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Monitoring vSphere account password & permission changes 

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If it is not clear by now, I REALLY love the power of vSphere Events and all the use cases it can enable, especially when used with our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to enable easy Event-Driven Automation.

Over the past month or so, I have noticed a series of questions from our field and customers across a number of topics pertaining to vSphere accounts including vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) users. My response to each of these questions all point back to a leveraging specific vSphere Events and I thought I share some of use cases in which vSphere Events can help

  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was changed?
  • How much time left (expiry) before the vSphere SSO user password must be changed?
  • Audit of all password changes for an vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • Who recently updated the password for a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was reseted?
  • Who recently added new permission to a vSphere user?
  • Who recently removed a permission from a vSphere user?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role with additional permissions?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role and removed permissions?

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Quick Tip - Pre-filled credentials in the vSphere 6.0 Web Client

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This past weekend I was finishing up a couple of demo recordings for my VMworld sessions in case the live demos fail for whatever reason, which has happened to me in the past. A few of the demos involve the vSphere Web Client UI and I thought instead of wasting time and potentially fat fingering credentials up on stage, I would try to do everything I can to remove any potential hiccups. In vSphere 6.0, the vCenter Single Sign-On page is now completely in HTML and this not only means you can customize the UI as I have shown here but you can also do some other neat tricks with it.

I decided to update the HTML page to automatically pre-fill both the SSO username and password, so that when I need to login to the vSphere Web Client, I just have to hit the tab key and then click on the login button.

prefilled-credentials
Disclaimer: Outside of a home lab or demo purposes, there is really no good reason for this. I can already hear Mike Foley sighing right now 😉 This also means that anyone who knows the address of your vSphere Web Client can just login, so you may want to only pre-fill the username and still type out the password in case you are concerned with that.

To pre-fill the value for the SSO username and/or password, you will need to edit the following file:

  • Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\unpentry.jsp
  • VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/unpentry.jsp

For pre-filling the username, you will need to add a "value" property along with its actual value in the following section:

<input id="username" class="margeTextInput" type="text" value="*protected email*"/>

For pre-filling the password, you will need to add a "value" property along with its actual value in the following section:

<input id="password" class="margeTextInput" type="password" value="VMware1!"/>

Once you have saved your changes, you can then reload the browser and you should see that the vSphere Web Client now has both the username and password automatically pre-filled when the webpage loads.

vCenter Server 6.0 Tidbits Part 11: Automate SSO Admin password change

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After publishing my last article around the topic of Automating SSO Admin configurations using some simple LDAP commands which is applicable for both vSphere 5.5 and 6.0. It was pointed out to me by my buddy G. Blair Fritz who works over in our GSS Organization that another handy operation to share with customers is the ability to easily and quickly change an SSO Administrator password across multiple Platform Services Controllers (PSC). This is especially important for customers who have a password rotation policy set fourth by their Security team which most Enterprise customers have and are require to update their admin passwords every N-number of days.

Though you will not be able to query for an existing SSO Administrator's password (it is encrypted), you can however modify the password and this will require you to provide a valid SSO Administrator's account to connect with. To modify an LDAP entry, we will need to first create a file that contains the change, in the example here we are going to name it change.ldif and it should contain the following where the "replace" keyword shows which property is getting modified and the next line after shows the value that it will be changed to. Make sure to also replace the dc=vghetto with the name of your SSO Site Name

dn: cn=administrator,cn=users,dc=vghetto,dc=local
changetype: modify
replace: userpassword
userpassword: VMware1!

To apply the change, we will now run the following ldapmodify command and specifying our change.ldif configuration file:

/opt/likewise/bin/ldapmodify -f change.ldif -h 192.168.1.60 -D "cn=administrator,cn=users,dc=vghetto,dc=local" -w 'VMware1!!'

automate-sso-admin-password-change
The really nice thing about this is that you can quickly change the password for your SSO Administrators across multiple Platform Services Controller and across multiple SSO Domains with a couple slight modifications to the command. How cool is that!? Thanks to Blair for sharing this awesome tidbit!