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How to Change the Splash Screen In vMA

06.29.2012 by William Lam // 1 Comment

To customize the default splash screen on vMA 5.x, you just need to edit /opt/vmware/etc/isv/welcometext which contains the version of vMA and the management URL as the default.

In addition to adding your own custom text, there are a few special variables that can use within the file and they should all be pretty self-explanatory:

${app.name}
${app.version}
${app.ip}
${app.url}
${vami.port}
${vami.url}

Here is an example of custom welcometext file:

This is a message on the vMA Splash Screen!
visit www.virtuallyghetto.com

Here are some default variables you can use:

app.name = ${app.name}
app.version = ${app.version}
app.ip = ${app.ip}
app.url = ${app.url}
vami.port = ${vami.port}
vami.url = ${vami.url}

The vami_login script is what controls the splash screen display and for the changes to take effect, you will need to restart the process. To do so, you just need to kill the current vami_login process and it will automatically respawn.

sudo kill $(ps -ef | grep vami_login | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')

Here is a screenshot of what the splash screen looks like after modifying the welcomtext file:

If you are interested in customizing other parts of vMA such as the MOTD (message of the day) which is the text that would be dispalyed upon a successful login, you can edit /etc/motd file. If you are interested in customizing the banner during an SSH connection, you can edit /etc/ssh/banner.

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Thank You For Voting!

02.27.2012 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com just released the annual Top 25 Virtualization Blog results for 2012 this weekend and I am very proud and honored to announce that virtuallyGhetto has moved up from last year's #25 spot to now the #8 spot on the list! It was only a year ago that virtuallyGhetto first made it onto the Top 25 Virtualization Blog after only been around for 4 months. I am very humble to be among some of the smartest and most respected folks in the virtualization community!

New this year, in addition to the top virtualization blog post are the individual categories such as top storage, video, news, etc blogs. Of course scripting was one of the categories and though I did not get number 1, which went to my good friend/colleague Alan Renouf. I did win second place and following third went to Luc Dekens, another awesome scripter/friend in the scripting/automation community.

I wanted to take this time and thank all my readers and supporters from the blog, VMTN forums, twitter and email for voting for virtuallyGhetto! I am very happy to see that the topics/content that interests me also interest others and I really appreciate your support. I hope to continue to put out great and unique content in 2012 and beyond. Thank you again for all your support!

Lastly, I wanted to give shout out to some of the guys who made the top favorite new blogs: Barry Coombs, Josh Atwell, Andrew Mauro to just name a few and Jake Robinson (who did not make it to that list!?). Keep doing what you are doing and never give up, it will all payoff at the end!

Congrats to all the Top 25 virtualization bloggers! 2012 will be be another great year for bloggers!

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Raising the vExpert & Community Bar, Part JC (John Troyer)

07.24.2011 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Some may call him a medical practitioner, some may refer to him as Cloud City's VMware Architect and others may know him as the VMware Stig ...

but all we know is he is the Great John Troyer!

First off I would like to wish John a Happy Birthday today and hope you have a vAwesome day!

Christopher Kusek, who you may know him as cxi on Twitter reached out to the vExpert community about a month ago regarding a secret embargoed project. We wanted a way to show John our appreciation and all the hard work and dedication he has done for the VMware and virtualization community. What better way than a bunch of blog posts thanking John from the vExpert crew!

I have known John for about three years now and have interfaced with him on many occasions from late night twitter DMs on vSpam in the VMTN blog, access to new VMware betas and embargo briefings, VMTN community forum feedback/improvements and access to VMware engineers for variety of Q/A and bug related questions.

For those of you who do not know John Troyer, he is the social media strategist for VMware, but John really does way more than that. He takes part in supporting the popular VMware Community Forums, VMTN Blogs and PlanetV12n along with several other individuals, he runs the extremely well known VMware Community Podcast every week in which he invites guests from all over to discuss all things VMware and virtualization and he is also the guy who created and runs the VMware vExpert program just to name a few.

John is a very genuine guy and really likes to help others whether it's getting someone in touch with a VMware product manager for more details about a topic or helping a fellow blogger attend a VMworld conference through a blogger's pass because he/she could not afford to attend. I think John has definitely raised the bar not only in the changes to come for the vExpert program of 2011 (which I am personaly excited about) but the VMware community bar as well.

I can not think of a single technology company that has such a great user community with an incredible amount of sharing and collaboration than the VMware/virtualization community. I think part of the reason why our community is so successful is due to people like John who fosters an active communication with the user base.

Cheers to all of John's achievements, his hard work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I would like to personally say Thank You!

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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