Change Vsphere 6.7 VCSA vcenter web client timeout

We recently upgraded from vmware 6.0 to vmware 6.7 and moved to the VCSA and are now forced to use the web client and the interface timeout is very short at 15 min for a multitasking admin that does not manage only vmware. We wanted to change our interface timeout to be much longer since anyway our computer are locked when we move away from it. This procedure works for both Vsphere web client and Vpshere client (HTML5 or Flex) but the change must be done under the "old" Flex client.

1-      Log into the vsphere web client (Flex)

2-      Go into “host and cluster” view

3-      Select the vcenter server

4-      In the right pane, choose “Configure”

5-      Choose advanced vCenter Server Settings

6-      Choose edit

7-      In the edit box, search for “timeout”

8-      Edit the “vpxd.http.clientIdleTimeout” value 

8-      We set it at 32400 (value is in second and equal to 9h) so you login once a day into it.

9-      Click “Ok”

Vmware PowerCLI 6 scheduled task

We just upgraded our VmWare environment to vSphere 6 with the vCenter installed on Windows 2012r2 using SQL server. The only problem we faced when we migrated the Windows scheduled task that run powercli command from the old 5.5 vCenter to the new one. Keep in mind that my powershell knowledge is very limited...

The task run weekly to return all the running VMs and also VMs with snapshot that are older than 7 days. After hours of investigation I finally found out that the script were running fine when ran directly from whitin powercli so the problem had to come from task scheduler. I found some blog page that suggested to test the scheduled task command with the parameter from the command prompt to see where things goes wrong. That proved to be the best troubleshooting option as I quickly realised that the script was running fine but all the vmware command were returning "invalid command name". This lead me to diagnose further and understand that the vim.psc1file is just a simple text file (powershell console file) instructing powershell to load specific module and/or snapin. I also discovered that you can create new powershell console file by using the export-console command, so I exported the console loaded from the powercli shortcut on the desktop and oh surprise the console file is different than the vim.psc1 created automatically from Vmware. I tested running my script with this powershell console file and tadam! The scripts all works again. The problem is that the default vim.psc1 file miss this line:

 <PSSnapIn Name="VMware.VimAutomation.Core" />

This SnapIn is the one used for the get-vm command and was the one causing the problem.