vCenter Server

vCenter Server Database retention purge schedule

11.08.2016 by William Lam // 5 Comments

The size of your vCenter Server Database is largely based on the amount events/tasks and performance statistics that you retain for your vSphere environment. You can view and edit these settings by going to the vCenter Server "General" settings as shown in the screenshot below (documentation here and here):

A common misconception when changing any one of these retention policies, especially when decreasing the amount of data to be retained, is that the existing data would be purged immediately to comply with the new settings. This is actually not the case and for data that is applicable for removal, there are a set of purge jobs that run on a specific schedule to perform the clean up. Below is the schedule in which these database jobs run for each of the data types:

Performance Statistics:

Daily Level - Once every 30 minutes starting at 00:00 (e.g. 00:00, 00:30, 01:00, etc.)
Weekly Level - Once every 2 hours starting at 01:45 (e.g. 01:45, 03:45, 05:45, etc. )
Monthly & Yearly Level - Once a day at 02:15

Events and Tasks:

Once a day at 00:15

For customers that are looking for immediate results and reclaim storage from within their VCDB, you can take a look at the following VMware KB 1025914 which outlines the specific instructions. This can especially be useful if you are looking to perform a Windows vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance Migration and wish to reduce the overall amount of data that is being copied over from your existing environment.

Automating the import of vCenter Server 6.x root certificate

07.27.2016 by William Lam // 14 Comments

In vSphere 6.0, you can now easily import your vCenter Server's trusted root CA certificate onto your client desktop by simply downloading it from the vCenter Server's landing page as shown in the screenshot below. Michael White had also recently wrote about this topic here which includes a step by step walk through.

Several weeks back I was working on an internal project which required the vCenter Server's root certificate. I was already aware of this interface and had written a quick and dirty script to automate the process of downloading and importing the certificate to the system I was working on. To be honest, I did not think much of the script after I wrote it. It was just recently that Alan Renouf, who was also involved in the project mentioned that it might be worth sharing the script as others might also find it useful. I thought that was a good idea and re-factored the code a bit since it was being used in a slightly different context. While doing so, I also created an equivalent PowerShell sample since the original script was meant to run on either a Mac OS X or Linux platform.

With that, I have created a simple shell script called import-vcrootcertificate.sh which can run on either Mac OS X or Linux system and a PowerShell script called Import-VCRootCertificate.ps1

Both scripts are pretty easy to use, they accept a single command-line argument which is the Hostname/IP Address of the vCenter Server that you wish to import the root certificate from. Both scripts ere able to detect if the vCenter Server is Windows or the VCSA since they have a slightly different URL to the root certificate before performing the import. Since the script will need access to your certificate store, you will need to run the scripts using a privileged account.

Here is a screenshot of running the PowerShell script:

Here is a screenshot of running the shell script:

Quick Tip - How to disable the landing page for vCenter Server 5.x & 6.x?

07.25.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The question of wanting to disable the default landing page for the vCenter Server is one that comes up infrequently. In fact, I probably see this maybe once or twice a year. However, when it does come up, it usually revolves around two topics: some sort of security risk and limiting users from obtaining software provided through these landing pages. In both case, simply disabling these landing pages will not solve either of these perceived issues.

I generally find these landing pages quite useful as they provide links to software downloads such as our legacy vSphere C# Client, SDK documentation as well as links to other interfaces to vCenter Server like the vSphere Web Client login, the datastore browser or the vSphere MOB. All of this information can be obtained through other official channels, so simply disabling this page does not really prevent users from downloading this content or accessing these interfaces.

On the second topic around security (which by no means am I an expert in), some customers feel that simply removing these default landing pages would some how prevent a security risk because a version of the software is no longer listed on that page? This is what some folks would call security through obscurity which just does not work. There are many different ways of identifying a version of vCenter Server and some of its components as well checking if the service is running. Simply removing these pages does little to nothing from stopping someone from retrieving this information using other methods. Instead, users should really be focusing how they are implementing security both in the software as well as the policies and processes they have in place which hopefully are inline with modern security practices.

In fact, by disabling some of these pages, you might even be hurting your overall customer experience depending on their familiarity with vCenter Server.

In any case, for those that are still inclined to disable these pages, below are the instructions on how to disable the various landing pages as I have not really seen this documented anywhere. The solution is actually quite simple which is to just rename the index files to something else which will prevent them from being loaded by the webserver.

Landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Tomcat landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/tomcat/webapps/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp

Landing page for vCenter Server 6.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Landing page for Platform Services Controll (vSphere 6.x)

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