How to modify user session timeouts in vCloud Availability 3.x

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

This article provides details on how to change the idle and maximum user session timeouts for vCloud Availability, allowing you to control the session timeouts according to your own security requirements.

Environment

VMware vCloud Availability 3.0.x

Resolution

To change the user session timeout in vCloud Availability, perform the following steps:

1. SSH to the vApp Replication Manager as root.
2. Navigate to the cloud service config directory:

cd /opt/vmware/h4/cloud/config/

3. Take a backup of the application.properties file:

cp application.properties application.properties.YYYY-MM-DD.bak

4. Edit the application.properties file with a text editor, such as vi.
5. At the bottom of the file add the following lines:

# Custom timeout settings
session.timeout=1800000
session.maxage=86400000

Note: The timeout values are in milliseconds and the default idle and maximum session timeouts are 30 minutes and 24 hours respectively.

6. Save the modified application.properties file.
7. Log into the vCloud Availability Provider Portal.
8. In the left pane, click System Monitoring.
9. Under System health, click Restart Service.

Note: Some pages in the vCloud Availability Portal refresh regularly to ensure you have up-to-date information on the system health and replication statuses. These pages send HTTP requests in the background keeping the user session alive past the idle timeout, even if there is no direct interaction in the browser from the user.