To match your corporate branding standards and to create a fully custom cloud experience, you can set the logo and the theme for your VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Portal and for the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal of each organization. In addition, you can modify and add custom links to the two upper right menus in the VMware Cloud Director portals.

Starting with VMware Cloud Director 10.4, you can customize the VMware Cloud Director portals by using a new VMware Cloud Director API and UI. If you want to use the branding alpha feature, see Customizing the VMware Cloud Director Portals by Using the BrandingThemes API.

If you want to use the legacy VMware Cloud Director branding implementation, to customize your branding attributes and links, you must use the branding API endpoint. See Getting Started with VMware Cloud Director OpenAPI.

Portal Branding

As part of the installation, VMware Cloud Director contains two themes - default and dark. You can create, manage, and apply custom themes. In addition, you can change the portal name, the logo, and the browser icon. In addition, the browser title adopts the portal name that you set.

To customize the Service Provider Admin Portal, you must set the branding attributes at a system level. Unless you configure individual branding for a particular tenant, each organization adopts the system branding attributes.

For a particular tenant, you can selectively override any combination of the portal name, header color, logo, icon, theme, and custom links. Any value that you do not set uses the corresponding system default value.

Note: By default, the individual tenant branding is not shown outside of a logged in session. The individual tenant branding does not appear on login and logout pages, so that tenants cannot discover the existence of other tenants. You can enable branding outside of logged in sessions by using the cell management tool: 
manage-config -n backend.branding.requireAuthForBranding -v false

For information about using the cell management tool, see the VMware Cloud Director Installation, Configuration, and Upgrade Guide .

Custom Links

Custom links are a component of the portal branding. There are two types of custom links:
  • override menu items replace the existing links for menu items Help, About, and Download VMRC. By default, Download VMRC redirects the users to https://my.vmware.com to download VMRC, which requires users to have registered accounts for downloading. By overriding this link, you can relocate the VMRC installer to your own server.
  • link menu items are new links that you add to the user menu item in the upper-right corner of the portal where the User preferences and Log out options appear. The new custom links appear in the order given in the API call.

    You can organize these custom links by using the section and separator menu items. A section menu item adds a header to the menu, a separator menu item adds a line to the menu.

Custom links support custom placeholders which you can use to pass identifying information to other applications in the form of query parameters.

VMware Cloud Director supports the following custom variables in the url value for a custom link:

Table 1. Custom Variables for Custom Links
Variable Description
${TENANT_NAME} Organization name
${TENANT_ID} Organization ID
${SESSION_TOKEN} x-vcloud-authorization token
For example, 
url: https://host:port/tenant/${TENANT_NAME}/vdcs
in the VMware Cloud Director Tenant Portal for organization myorg is converted to: 
url: https://host:port/tenant/myorg/vdcs