Hello gang. I apologize for the frequency slowdown in blog posts but I’ve been _insert lame excuse everyone has heard before here_. Truth be told, I am busy working on a project which I hope to have available the virtualization community on or before VMworld 2009.
This post is a no brainer, maybe you’ve seen it before on another blog or maybe you’ve figured it out for yourself. For me, I can honestly say it was the latter, but with some minimal registry skills, it’s not so difficult.
In short, my Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC) cached list of host connection entries (at the login prompt) had gotten much too polluted over time with many stale entries that I wanted to get rid of. This can happen over the course of time if you use your VIC to connect to many different vCenter servers or explicit hosts in various environments. Particularly, I would think this can happen quickly to consultants who travel from site to site supporting virtual infrastructures.
There is a way to manipulate the cached list you see in the pulldown box. And by manipulate, I don’t just mean delete. In addition to deleting entries, you can also modify entries (perhaps for a DNS suffix migration), re-order entries (VMware doesn’t maintain this list in alpha order necessarily or perhaps you’d like a custom sort order), or add entries (consider a scenario where you have a packaged VIC that you want to roll out to your new VMware admin – instead of presenting the new admin, who has no knowledge of the environment, with a blank VIC, help them hit the ground running with a pre-populated list of vCenter servers or ESX hosts to connect to).
As the title of this post indicates, the cached entries are stored in the Windows registry and are tied to each individual user profile (HKU). You’ll find the comma delimited list of entries in the following registry key:
HKU\<User SID>\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\
The value name is RecentConnections and the type is REG_SZ
There’s one more value nearby that sticks out like a sore thumb:
HKU\<User SID>\Software\VMware\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI\SSLIgnore\
The value names vary by connection name or IP address and the type is REG_SZ. These represent each connection where you’ve checked the little box telling the VIC that you want to ignore SSL certificate warnings which you will receive in an “out of the box” configuration. I can’t think of a great use case scenario why someone who has chosen to ignore SSL warnings would want to re-enable them, other than a situation where they’ve now enabled legitimate SSL.
To find out why disabling SSL warnings might not be such a great idea, see my previous blog post titled SSL Integration With VirtualCenter.
As they say in the ARMY, or at least on M*A*S*H… “That is all”.
