unpentry.jsp

The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 Update 1 just GA'ed late last week and like many in the community, I also went ahead and upgraded my home lab to this latest release. vSphere 6.5 Update 1 contains a ton of fixes as well as several new capabilities which you can read all about in the release notes here and here.

One neat little trick I take advantage of in my lab environments when deploying the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is actually pre-filling out the credentials for the vSphere Client UI (not recommended for production environments of course) which I had blogged about here a few years back. Sine I have many different environments for different scenarios, I find myself being lazy and having to type in the credentials to each one of these environments. Instead, I can pre-fill either the username and/or password (which I will stress again, not recommended for production) within the vSphere Client Login UI page which is simply just using HTML.

After making the necessary changes to my VCSA 6.5u1 system, I needed to reboot my ESXi host and when everything came back up, I was surprised to find my changes to the vSphere Client Login UI had disappeared. It took me awhile to figure out why the changes were not persisting across reboots. There seems to be a change in behavior compared to prior releases of the VCSA (6.0 & 6.5) on when this capability was actually possible.

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A common feature request that I hear from customers from time to time is the ability to customize the login screen for the vSphere Web Client. Going beyond just aesthetics such as adding an organizations logo or colors, it is often a mandatory requirement for some organizations to display a security or warning banner to the users prior to logging in. In prior releases of vSphere, the login page of the vSphere Web Client (which is actually from vCenter Single Sign-On service) was written in Flash which meant that it was impossible to change without recompiling the source code.

In vSphere 6.0 (yes, vSphere 6.0 is required), the vCenter Single Sign-On login page is now written using regular HTML and CSS. This means you can actually now customize the login page with your own logos, colors or text that you wish to display to your end users. Not only can you customize the login for vCenter Server but you can also do the same for vRealize Automation Center as long as you are using the latest version of the Platform Services Controller which now provides other services in addition to vCenter Single Sign-On.

UPDATE (07/14/16): For vSphere 6.0 Update 2 environments, please follow the instructions here as there have been some minor changes. This article is only applicable for vSphere 6.0 and vSphere 6.0 Update 1 environments.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, if you decide to enable this, please use at your own risk and ensure you backup all original files in case you need revert back to the original configurations.

There are two specific files that you will want to take a look at, the first is unpentry.jsp which controls the look and feel of the actual login page and the second is login.css which controls the stylesheet for the login page. If you wish to include your own images including gifs (which I did not expect would work), there is a img directory that you can reference. Below are the paths to these configuration files for both a Windows vCenter Server and the VCSA 6.0.

Windows vCenter Server 6.0 / 6.0u1

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\unpentry.jsp
C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\resources\css\login.css
C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\resources\img

VCSA 6.0 / 6.0u1

/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/unpentry.jsp
/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/resources/css/login.css
/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/resources/img

Note: It is highly recommended that you backup all original files before making edits so you can easily revert to the original configuration. If you are only updating the image to figure out layout and placement, you may notice changes are not reflected when you refresh the vSphere Web Client. The reason for this is that the image is only refreshed when the configuration files (.jsp) is updated. You can easily do this by simply opening it up and then saving it without making changes. I found this was the quickest way to force a reload of an updated image that has been uploaded.

I figure it might be cool to create a couple of vSphere Web Client "themes" for some of my buddies like Rawlinson Rivera, Duncan Epping, Alan Renouf, Mike Foley and Cormac Hogan. I hope Rawlinson likes his theme as I know how big of a fan he is 😉 I have also created a Github repo customize-vsphere-web-client-6.0 where you can find all the themes below. Feel free to create your own and contribute them back to the community.

Rawlinson Rivera Theme -

Duncan Epping Theme -

Alan Renouf Theme -

Mike Foley Theme -

Cormac Hogan Theme -

Here is an additional bonus theme as I could not leave out my good buddy CaptainVSAN!

I am looking forwarding to see what others come up with in terms of their own vSphere Web Client themes and be sure to share them back by either posting back here or better yet, contributing to the Github repository.

Image Sources:

http://www.twitterevolutions.com/bgs/justin-bieber-2.jpg
http://s1174.photobucket.com/user/D-A-C-20/media/Holland%20EUIV/Holland.png.html
http://www.chrisschofield.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PowerCLIman.jpg
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view6/2662404/you-didnt-say-the-magic-word-o.gif

vSphere Client Login UI customizations do not persist in VCSA 6.5 Update 1

How to customize the new vSphere 6.0 Web Client login UI?