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vCloud Director 5.1 Introduces "Open in vSphere Web Client" & Task Correlation ... Awesomeness!

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Have you ever had to troubleshoot something in vCloud Director such as looking into a particular vApp and then realizing you needed to jump over to the vSphere environment to continue troubleshooting? This meant you had to perform a separate login to your vSphere environment and most likely using a different set of credentials and then find the set of Virtual Machines that made up that vCloud Director vApp ... painful and annoying right? Wish you could just right click and jump straight to that vApp construct in vSphere?

Well, now you can with the latest release of vCloud Director 5.1 which introduces a new option called "Open in vSphere Web Client".

In the screenshot above, I have a vCloud Director vApp which contains 3 Virtual Machines and I want to jump straight to that object in the vSphere Web Client. To do so, simply right click on the object and select "Open in vSphere Web Client".

This will open up a new browser to the vSphere Web Client and locate the object in the appropriate vCenter Server and automatically log you in using the new vCenter SSO. Pretty cool huh!? This new option is not just limited to vCloud Director vApps and VMs, but applies to any vSphere object found within vCloud Director.

Note: You will need to be a System Administrator in vCloud Director to perform this operation as you will need access to the vSphere infrastructure.

Another challenge that you might have faced while troubleshooting in vCloud Director is to be able to correlate the tasks generated from vCloud Director and map those back to vSphere tasks in vCenter Server. This is not a trivial thing to do and required you to jump between vCloud Director and vCenter Server manually correlating the tasks. In vCloud Director 5.1, this has been enhanced by providing users with a single view for a given vCloud Director task and all the associated vSphere tasks that were created.

When you open a given vCloud Director task, you will be defaulted to the vCloud Director task details as you would expect. In the same view, there is also a new tab called vSphere Tasks which contains all the vCenter Server tasks generated from that given vCloud Director task.
As you can see from these two enhancements, you will be able to quickly and easily view all tasks that have taken place between vCloud Director and vCenter Server, all from a single location. If you need to drill down further into the vSphere layer, it is simply a right click and you will be taken directly to the vSphere object in the vSphere Web Client without having to provide additional credentials.

Configuring New vSphere Web Client Session Timeout

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Just like you could in the old vSphere C# Client, users can also configure a session timeout for the new vSphere Web Client in the latest release of vSphere 5.1. This not only ensures that idle sessions automatically disconnect after a certain period of time but also helps reduce the resources consumed on the vCenter Server as each session allocates a certain amount of resources.

To configure the session timeout, you will need to login to the server running the vSphere Web Client service (which is usually your vCenter Server) and find the webclient.properties file and change the default timeout and then restart the vSphere Web Client service. For the VCSA, the default timeout value is 120 minutes and I assume it is the same default for the Windows vCenter Server.

Step 1 - Locate the webclient.properties file:

    VCSA 5.x

/var/lib/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties

    VCSA 6.x

/etc/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties

    Windows vCenter Server 5.x

%ALLUSERPROFILE%\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vsphere-client\webclient.properties

    Windows vCenter Server 6.x

%ALLUSERPROFILE%\VMware\vSphere Web Client\webclient.properties

Step 2 - Un-comment and change session.timeout value to desired value:

session.timeout = 120

Step 3 - Restart the vSphere Web Client Service:

/etc/init.d/vsphere-client restart

You will need to restart the vSphere Web Client service for the changes to go into effect. For the Windows vCenter Server, just restart the vSphere Web Client service and for the VCSA, run the above command.

In my lab, I configured the time out to be 1 minute, once the session has gone idle for the configured period, you will automatically be logged out and brought back to login page with the following message:

 

Specifying Default Domains for vSphere Web Client Login

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If you add an additional identity source to vCenter SSO, such as Active Directory during vCenter Server setup, you might have noticed that you need to specify the full domain name and user id to be able to login to the vSphere Web Client.

It took me awhile to figure out where to set the default domain as I thought it would have been in the VCSA web management interface as I deployed my VCSA using an automated script. I thought I share this quick tidbit in case someone was running into a similar issue.

To specify a default domain for one of your identity sources, you will need to login to vSphere Web Client as "root" or an administrator who has access to the vCenter SSO Configurations. Click on Administration tab and then to Configuration under "Sign-On and Discovery" on the left hand side of the screen.

You should see your AD identity source at the top as well as the two default identity source provided by vCenter SSO (these can not be removed). If you want to add an identity source as a default domain, you will need to highlight your identity source and then select the CD icon with the arrow, which will add that to list of default domains at the bottom of the screen. 

Once your domain is listed at the bottom, you will need to perform one additional step which is to actually save the configuration by clicking on the little "disk" icon. I did not realize this until I logged out and nothing changed.

Note: By default, when you add to the default domain list, you will append to the very end of the list. You have the ability to arrange the order by highlighting the domain and using the up/down arrows.

Go ahead and log out and log back in and now you only have to specify the username as the default domain will automatically be used.