How to disable vCenter banner "Transition from vLCM Baselines to vLCM Images in a VCF environment should be performed via SDDC manager only."

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

You may notice the following vCenter banner.
Transition from vLCM Baselines to vLCM Images in a VCF environment should be performed via SDDC manager only. Please review https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=385617.

Manually click "X" to close the banner, however when refresh vCenter UI, the notification appears again.

 

Environment

VCF 9.0.1

VCF 9.1.0

Cause

The issue is caused by the MessageAnnouncementService within the Lifecycle Manager (LCM) component, which is responsible for posting and maintaining the vLCM transition warning banner in vCenter.

In VCF 9.0.x, this banner is intentionally permanent as a safety mechanism to remind users that vLCM transitions must be performed through SDDC Manager rather than the vCenter UI.

In VCF 9.1 Greenfield deployments, the appearance of this banner is a result of a gap in the service identifying the current state. The service currently lacks a precondition check to determine if the environment actually contains clusters running in VUM/Baseline mode.

Resolution

To disable the vCenter transition banner, you must modify the Lifecycle Manager (LCM) application configuration. This procedure requires an SSH session to the SDDC Manager appliance.

Prerequisites:

• Identify the FQDN or IP address of the SDDC Manager appliance.
• Ensure you have the credentials for either the root or vcf user.

Steps to disable notifications:

1. SSH into the SDDC Manager appliance using a terminal client.

   • If logging in as user: root, proceed to step 2.
   • If logging in as user: vcf, run the following command to elevate your privileges:

     su root

2. Open the LCM application properties file using a text editor:

   vi /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties

3. Locate the following property and change its value to false:

   lcm.announcement.message.enabled=false

4. Save the file and exit the editor (:wq!).

5. Restart the Lifecycle Manager service to apply the changes:

   systemctl restart lcm

Notes:

• Banner Persistence: Existing announcements in vCenter will remain until they expire (24 hours by default) or are manually removed. Once the property is set to false, the banner will not be recreated after it expires or is dismissed.
• Greenfield VCF 9.1: For new VCF 9.1 installations where all clusters are already in Image mode, this workaround has zero collateral damage as the transition guidance does not apply to the environment.
• Brownfield/Upgraded Environments: Disabling this property stops all vLCM transition announcements. If the environment still contains clusters in Baseline/VUM mode that require transition, this safety mechanism will no longer be present to warn against performing transitions via the vCenter UI.