Recently I discovered you can change the default ESXi DCUI screen.
This feature is already present for a long time…. just check one of my favorite blog sites (virtualGhetto) for this item here. Yes he blogged about it in 2010….. I know
Why would you want to change it
- Your Company wants a warning shown on the DCUI
- Security, don’t show hostname, ip etc…
- showing off ASCI-ART – just for fun
- ….
For me, it was point 3….
I run on my laptop VMware Workstation and am sometimes in need of spinning up nested ESXi with different kind of versions. For this reason I build a provisioning VM, so I can network boot empty VMs and choose from an iPXE menu the ESXi version I want to work with. (maybe some interesting stuff for a blog serie) And this setup wasn’t finished with a custom DCUI screen.
How does it work
Until version ESXi 7.0 there is a text file /etc/vmware/welcome, which you can edit. When it is succesfully edited, the DCUI wil show the result.
My screen shows: VMware product and version, license, Memory, IP, SSL Thumbprint and ASCI-ART 🙂
You can also edit the logonbanner, shown when you access the host via SSH. And the support info
Until ESXi 7 ?
Yes, until… well almost. Until version 7.x you just could simply edit the file /etc/vmware/welcome. But it isn’t there anymore.
But there is a different way. Called CLI. You can edit the welcome message with esxcli and powercli. Information is found in the VMware knowledge base kb2046347. And this works for a lot off ESXi versions. I’ve tested it succesfully from 5.5 to 7.0.
ASCII-ART
Well, you can show your creative side. Some guidelines I found are:
- screen with is 125 characters
- max. rows about 25
- check for ASCI TAB character, ASCII nr 9
- use a site for creating art like this one
Especially number 3 is a killer. A lot of text editors will replace a certain amount of spaces with a TAB character… and this will mess up your screen.
ESXCLI method
The syntax is easy, just
esxcli system welcomemsg set -m 'your welcome'And that is what is shown in the kb article. But how do you create a complete screen. Well, there are some undocumented parameters you can use. The article by William Lam (see above) shows some of them. But I haven’t find a site with all of them.
With those parameters you create in a text editor your screen…. like this one
Every line that uses a different background color then black is 125 characters long, not including the length of any fields that are used, like {color:white}.
After you created your file, you can place it in /etc/vmware or use esxcli to edit the welcome message.
If the file is placed in /tmp/welcome.txt then your instruction is like
esxcli system welcomemsg set -m "$(cat /tmp/welcome.txt)"And voila, you have a custom welcome screen.
DCUI with SSH
The DCUI is not only shown on the console screen of ESXi, but also accessed via SSH by >dcui
The result is shown below.
Enjoy.
vB(art)log 