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Quick Tip - Enabling vCenter Events for NTP (Network Time Protocol) or PTP (Precision Time Protocol) operations

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Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you may have noticed a new "Enable monitoring events" setting when configuring time for your ESXi hosts, whether that is using the classic Network Time Protocol (NTP) or the newly introduced Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

What exactly does this enabling this setting do? This was a recent question that I had answered internally and figured I would share the detail as the description may not be super clear. Simply put, this enables the publishing of different NTP and/or PTP operations as vCenter Server Events, which can then be used to audit time skews in your environment for compliance to troubleshooting or debugging.

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How to programmatically retrieve vCenter Server Patch & Update History?

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After upgrading my homelab to the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 3 release, I was just looking at the "History" tab within the Virtual Machine Management Interface (VAMI), which gives you a historical view of all the patches and updates that have been applied to your vCenter Server since its initial deployment. I am not exactly sure when this was feature was introduced, but it can definitely be useful for both auditing but also debugging/troubleshooting purposes.

Of course, I was curious about this information and wanted to see if I could retrieve it using something like PowerCLI. However when I started to look for the API, I realized that there may not be a public API for this ... but that did not stopped me and taking a look at Chrome Developer, I quickly saw the endpoint which was /rest/appliance/update/history and I was able to figure out a workaround giving the same data.

Below are two examples on accessing this data using either PowerShell or cURL

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Quick Tip - How to disable the vCenter Server Update Notification banner?

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I received this question on Twitter from Andreas asking the following:

When a new vCenter Server update is available, a notification banner is automatically displayed in the vSphere UI. This functionality was introduced as part of vSphere 7.0 and part of the new vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) capability. This is a very useful feature since administrators spend most of their time in the vSphere UI and when new update was available, it would only be displayed in the VAMI UI, which most folks were not logging into on a regular basis.


Today, the update notification banner is always displayed and there is no way to temporarily disable it. This can be annoying if you do not intend to update your vCenter Server immediately and I assume this is why Andreas was asking about either postponing or disabling the notification all together.

Currently, the only way I am aware of for disabling this notification is to actually disable the vCenter Server Life-Cycle Manager Remote Plugin itself. You can do this by navigating to Administration->Solutions->Client Plugins and then selecting "vCenter Server Life-cycle Manager" and click on the Disable button. You can refresh the webpage or logout and you should no longer see the notification banner.

Disclaimer: By disabling the vCLM plugin, you are disabling more than just the banner but all vCenter vLCM functionality including Interop and Update Planner capabilities. If these are things you require, do not disable the plugin.


I can certainly see a nice feature enhancement in the future where vLCM notifications can be postponed or deferred to a later date. I will share this blog post and feedback with the vLCM PM for consideration.