I am currently building out a new vCloud director to replace our old labmanager environment and I was very pleased to see that you can put the cell into a maintenance mode while doing work on the back end.
All you do is SSH to the vCloud Director Server (In my case RHE) and do the following
# server vmware-vcd stop
# /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin.vmware-vcd-cell maintenance
Now i go to my vCloud url excited and expecting to get a message that the sire is down for maintenance (so everyone doesnt call the helpdesk) and what do I see in my browser?
Service Unavailable
that is the actual message that is displayed in your browser and according to VMware support there is no way to change it.
So why take the time to build a script for this mode and then make it TOTALLY USELESS. they might as well just put a big old 404 there. This DOES NOT in any way
tell users that the cell is being worked on and will not stop calls to the help desk.
I would think that a huge product like this with all these bells and whistles and for the $$ you would be able to change a line of text on a maintenance message .. or at the very least .. have a meaningful message displayed by default like
Cell is down for maintenance, Please try again Later