WilliamLam.com

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 - vSphere Permission to view vSphere with Tanzu Namespaces

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If you wish to create a custom vSphere Role that has the ability to view vSphere Namespaces which is part of vSphere with Tanzu, you will need to add the user to the following vSphere Single Sign-On Group: ServiceProviderUsers, which is located under Single Sign On->Users and Groups->Groups (2nd page) within the vSphere UI.


Once added, you can logout and log back in and the user should now see the vSphere Namespaces as shown in the screenshot below. In my example, I have a user named william which is created in the default vsphere.local domain and has been assigned the user the vSphere Read Only role along with this additional SSO group. They will be able to view all resources but will not have permission to make any changes to the infrastructure. If you are using Active Directory, the exact same process works and just make sure you log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

vSphere 6.5b prevents vSphere Web Client logins for users w/o VC permissions

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A patch update was just released for vCenter Server 6.5, dubbed vSphere 6.5b. While glancing through the release notes, I caught one interesting "resolved issue" which I thought was worth sharing.

Users with no vCenter Server permissions can log in to the vSphere Web Client

Users without permissions can log in to the vSphere Web Client. Users can click the menu options, but no inventory is displayed.

Users with no permissions can no longer log in to the vSphere Web Client.

To enable the login, set the allow.user.without.permissions.login = true property in the webclient.properties file.

This particular behavior has been something that has confused a few customers and has been asked about since the introduction of vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) service. The issue or rather the confusion is that prior to the SSO service, vCenter Server handled both authentication as well as authorization.

With SSO, authentication was no longer being handled by vCenter Server and this meant that even if you had no permissions in vCenter Server but you could authenticate to SSO (especially common when Active Directory is configured), you would still be allowed to login to the vSphere Web/H5 Client.


Although vCenter Server would does the right thing and does not display any inventory if you do not have any permissions, it was still not a desired behavior in addition to the confusion it caused. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have changed this default behavior by disallowing logins to the vSphere Web/H5 Client if a user has no VC permissions. Below is the message you will receive if you try to login without VC permissions.


If you wish to revert to the original behavior, you can do so by simply adding the allow.user.without.permissions.login = true setting into the vSphere Web/H5 Client configuration file (webclient.properties) and restart the vSphere Web/H5 Client service. I think many of our customers will appreciate this fix as well as the new default behavior!