Change vRA URLs

[pizzle85]

I have four vRA load balanced service URLs:

1. hosting.vra.com - application
2. mgr.hosting.vra.com - IaaS manager
3. web.hosting.vra.com - IaaS Web
4. sso.hosting.vra.com - vCenter SSO

My issue is that i want to use hosting.vra.com as a custom home page for the vRA service. I've attempted to modify the Tomcat config on the application servers with some success but i would prefer to do as little customization there as possible. Being so i thought about trying to move the application service URL from hosting.vra.com to app.hosting.vra.com instead so i can have hosting.vra.com point to a web server with my custom home page on it.

I wasn't able to find any documentation around doing something like this. Has anyone out there successfully change the URLs associated with the various vRA services?

[stvkpln]

It really depends on what the load balancer is capable of.. in theory, If you're using an F5 LTM, I know there's way for it to parse the requested URI and send the traffic to different pools... i.e. if you request hosting.vra.com/vcac, it'll send to the vRA CAFE server.. but if you ask for hosting.vra.com/, it sends to wherever your custom hosting page is. If you change the name of the CAFE URL, though.. you're going to have to go and fix a number of things on the IaaS side. All of those steps should be documented in the public documentation set (in theory).

[pizzle85]

Thanks stvpkln, i considered doing something like that on the LTM. We like to keep iRules on there to a minimum so we'd prefer to do this on the box if possible. My other concern was that anything using the root directory could break.

I wasn't able to find any documentation on changing the URL or hostname of one of the servers in a distributed vRA environment.

[sbeaver]

I did something similar because I wanted and easy URL for the users to remember without trying to bookmark the vcac logon page with the security stuff in the headers so I created a landing page that would automatically send the users to the vcac logon page

[willonit · Accepted solution]

I did something similar to beaver to redirect users to the login page. You could modify the default page on the vRA appliance if you wanted to create a friendlier landing page. See the details here. Just remember to make any changes to all vRA appliances.

[pizzle85]

Thanks guys,

Beaver, my issue is that the URL i want them to hit initially is hosting.vra.com but its taken by the application service.

Will, i saw your page and used it to create my own custom page, thank you very much for blogging it. In my testing i created an entirely new web page and everything seemed to work well. I just didn't want to have to replace that customization after upgrades or migrations.

[sbeaver]

Just to throw up another goody in case you guys have not seen this.  VRA Brand Customizer for change the log on page.  http://automatevi.com 

[pizzle85]

So, i ended up creating an entire new homepage structure with a new css, image files, includes, the works in .jsp format (i built is as HTML then converted to .jsp and adjusted my includes). I followed the instructions in Will's blog to get to the ROOT directory, copied in all my page content and replaced the default index.jsp file with my custom index.jsp file (renamed the old one of course). i set the permissions on all the copied files to 644. Hitting the root page now displays my custom page. Everything rebooted successfully, all services show registered, and im able to deploy machines.