Advanced Options vRealize Automation – Hide Properties & Snapshots tab

When you look at the item details for a Virtual Machine in the vRealize Automation Portal there are several tabs which show information. Most of this information is usable for the customer, like the CPU, memory and storage configuration. Besides this tabs the tabs Properties and Snapshots are visible, during a deployment of a Virtual Machine you often use advanced properties which are of no use to the customer. This is also the case for the Snapshots tab, you might have disabled snapshotting on your blueprint so why show the Snapshots tab? We didn’t expect this being a problem, but in several customer environments we got a lot of questions of customers about the information on the properties tab and why they cannot make a snapshot on the Virtual Machine. So we looked if it was possible to make the tabs invisible. And it is possible by editing a configuration file on the IaaS web server called EditVirtualMachine.aspx, in our case on the default location: c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\vCAC\Server\Website\Leases\ You can edit this file with an editor like Notepad++. Properties tab: On line 265 in the EditVirtualMachine file you need the add ClientVisible=”False” so the line looks like this: This can also be done for the Snapshots tab by editing line 278 in the EditVirtualMachine file and add ClientVisible=“False” When you now refresh the Item Details the tabs are gone, so you don’t have to restart any services. The downside, you as an admin are also no longer able to see the properties for this VM in the portal. I added a simple workflow so the properties are viewable with the use of Orchestrator. Get Properties of vRA_VirtualMachine.workflow