Change the refresh period of alarm notifications in the vSphere Web Client

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

In the vSphere Web Client, alarms that appear in the Alarms sidebar refresh every 120 seconds. You can change the default setting to a time period that suits your vSphere environment.

Retrieving alarms is a resource-intensive operation. The minimum recommended refresh interval is one minute. In large environments with multiple vCenter Server instances, shorter refresh intervals might impact the overall performance of the vSphere Web Client.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vSphere Web Client 5.1.x

Resolution

Change the alarm refresh period

1. Log in as an administrator to the Windows machine where the server component of the vSphere Web Client is installed.
   
2. Navigate to <vSphere_Web_Client_installation_directory>\plugin-packages\opsmgmt-client\plugins
   The default installation directory of the vSphere Web Client is C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere Web Client.
   
3. Open the alarm-ui-war-5.1.0.war file with a file archiver application.
4. Inside the archive, open the plugin.xml file.
   Note: Do not extract the files. Edit the plugin.xml file within the archive.
5. Edit the value in the <refreshIntervalSec> tag to set a refresh period in seconds.
   The default value is 120. Typing 0 disables the automatic refresh. The maximum value is 86400, or one day.
   
6. Save the file and close the file archiver application.
7. Stop the VMware vSphere Web Client service.
8. Delete the directory <vSphere_Web_Client_installation_directory>\server\work.
9. Start the VMware vSphere Web Client service.