You have noticed that while working on both vSphere Web Client and HTML5 vSphere Client, You will be logged out from the vsphere Web Client due to inactivity. This may be annoying you to log in multiple times to your Web Client environment. We can increase session timeout value for VMware vSphere Web client for both vCenter Server Appliance and Windows vCenter setup.
Sphere Web Client session timeout period was increased to 120 minutes by default. First you’ll need to enable Shell access to the vCenter appliance before you can make any changes to the Session Timeout values.
Enabling Shell Access
۱- Login as root to the VMware Appliance Management URL typically on port 5480. For exmaple, https://vcenter:5480
۲- Select Access and then click Edit
۳- If you plan to use SSH to access the appliance, toggle on Enable SSH Logon. For Bash Shell access from the Virtual Machine’s console, toggle on Enable Bash Shell
Change the Session Timeout value for the vSphere Client
۱- If using SSH, login as root to the vCenter Appliance. If you’re using the Virtual Machine’s console, use ALT+F1 and login as root.
۲- At the prompt, type “shell“
۳- Change to the /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui directory.
cd /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui۴- Use the VI editor to launch the webclient.properties file.
vi webclient.properties۵- Using your keyboard’s arrow keys, navigate to the line “session.timeout” and then press the “i” key to enable editing. Set the session.timeout value to the desired value. The example below is for 12 hours. Once the value has been changed, press the “ESC” key to exit editing and then type “:wq” and tap Enter. This will write the changes to the file and exit the VI editor.
session.timeout = 720۶- Stop and start the vsphere-ui service.
service-control --stop vsphere-ui
service-control --start vsphere-ui
Session Timeout In The vSphere Client UI (vSphere 7 Update 2)
In vSphere Client UI (vSphere 7 Update 2) you can set this property in UI. You’ll find the Session Timeout setting under the menu Administration / Deployment / Client Configuration.
Now unfortunately you can’t make this setting zero minutes via the UI. Zero, representing no idle session timeout. So you can edit this property by SSH.
