vCenter Keyboard Shortcuts

Even though vCenter does a pretty good job of telling us what the keyboard shortcuts are, most of us don’t pay attention until someone tells us directly….I know I didn’t. So here is me telling you directly 🙂

Also I can’t quite get the formatting to look right…so I apologize if everything isn’t exactly in line.

Inventory Views

  • Search                                  Ctrl+Shift+F
  • Hosts and Clusters          Ctrl+Shift+H
  • VMs and Templates        Ctrl+Shift+V
  • Datastores                          Ctrl+Shift+D
  • Networking                        Ctrl+Shift+N

Administration

  • Roles                                     Ctrl+Shift+R
  • Sessions                               Ctrl+Shift+S
  • Licensing                             Ctrl+Shift+L
  • System Logs                       Ctrl+Shift+O
  • Server Settings                  Ctrl+Shift+I

Management

  • Scheduled Tasks               Ctrl+Shift+T
  • Events                                  Ctrl+Shift+E
  • Maps                                     Ctrl+Shift+M
  • Host Profiles                      Ctrl+Shift+P
  • Customization Specifications Manager Ctrl+Shift+U

Actions on Highlighted Objects(Not all actions are available for all objects)

  • New Folder                         Ctrl+F
  • New Cluster                         Ctrl+L
  • Add Host                              Ctrl+H
  • New VM                                Ctrl+N
  • New vNetwork Distributed Switch Ctrl+K
  • New Resource Pool          Ctrl+O
  • New vApp                            Ctrl+A
  • Add Permission                 Ctrl+P
  • Open in New Window      Ctrl+Alt+N
  • Add Alarm                           Ctrl+M
  • Add Scheduled Task        Ctrl+S

Actions on VMs

  • Power On                            Ctrl+B
  • Power Off                           Ctrl+E
  • Suspend                              Ctrl+Z
  • Reset                                    Ctrl+T
  • Shut Down Guest            Ctrl+D
  • Restart Guest                    Ctrl+R
  • Enter Full Screen              Ctrl+Alt+Enter

Navigating vCenter

  • Back                                      Alt+Left
  • Forward                               Alt+Right
  • Home                                    Alt+Home
  • Cycle Tab Forward           Ctrl+Tab
  • Cycle Tab Backward        Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Did I miss any? Is this useful? Leave me a Comment!


4 Comments

Zach Splaingard · February 23, 2011 at 10:03 am

Don’t kid yourself about this not being useful, it’s a great reference!

    C-Rad · February 23, 2011 at 11:26 am

    Hooray!

David · January 3, 2012 at 7:25 pm

does anyone know if or what the vcenter delete vm keyboard shortcut might be? The “Delete” key appears to be a shortcut key for “Remove from Inventory”

    C-Rad · January 3, 2012 at 7:56 pm

    It’s very possible that is intended to prevent terrible “Oops” moments. However if you wanted to delete several at a time you could easily do it in powershell…

    get-vm -location sandbox|remove-vm -delete -whatif

    That line will get you all the VMs listed in the folder Sandbox and then Delete them. The -whatif is sort of like a practice, it just states What it would do IF it ran the command. Remove -whatif from the end when you want to actually delete them for reals 🙂

    Let me know if you have any other questions!

    Edit: I should note though, not being careful with that command and just deleting VMs from disk in general is a bit scary and should be handled with the utmost care. Also please always double the VM/s you are deleting before doing so…….K that is my disclaimer 🙂

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