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hennish
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

vSphere Web Client - wrong date/time format?

Hi. In the vSphere Web Client, it seems the dates/times are always displayed in American format (mm/dd/yyyy, h:mm AM/PM) instead of my computer's and my vCenter (Windows) Server's correct locale/format, which should be yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm.

Any ideas on how to change this? My searches are coming up empty regarding this issue.

4 Replies
RParker
Immortal
Immortal

The web most likely is hard coded to that time format.  I would call VMware and ask them.. this is not a very common problem.  VMware is located in USA, not surprised some elements would be hard coded to USA\EST format.

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MartinSvec
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I agree, it's annoying to work with the hardcoded American date/time format for non-US people. Compared to vSphere Client, we also miss seconds in Tasks/Events Console. Exact time including seconds is very important for searching in logs and analysis of issues.

Martin

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PeterBlatherwic
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I just wanted to whole-heartedly agree here. 

US time format needs to be changeable to locale-specific, configurable.  And/or lock time-zone to (say) GMT/UTC w. no DST stuff, instead of the actual time zone the vCenter / ESXi's are located in, in case there are pieces of the overall environment that are in different time zones.  (My nightmare would be have some hosts in (say) Arizona (no DST), some others in (say) New York, and the management servers in yet a different time zone.  Now try to figure out when things really happened!  ;^) 

vCloud Director too.  Same issue.  Except individual Organizations might want to set their own, separate from vCloud system level. 

This has not changed in 5.5, as far as i can tell, BTW.  (That's why I'm surfing for an answer now...)  

Maybe best would be to default to the setting of the underlying OS supporting vCenter / vCloud Dir / Whatever.  But still allow date-time format to be over-ridden in vSphere and vCloud layers. 

Personally, I'm a huge fan of ISO time/date format.  Completely un-ambiguous.  Sorts like a dream (which US system sucks horribly at.)  Others will have their own opinions -- and should be allowed to set them! 

VMware folks listening?

-- PeterB

mgi236
Contributor
Contributor

For Canadian English try this – /?locale=en_CA

Example to display the vSphere Web Client in Canadian English you would use –

https://<hostname>:9443/vsphere-client/?locale=en_CA

you should get date like this format yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss

The vSphere Web Client and Localization

ref: The vSphere Web Client and Localization - VMware vSphere Blog