vSphere UI Client Plugin is at N/A state before vSphere 8 Upgrade

We are rapidly approaching the end of vSphere 7 support (October ’25), and during a vSphere 8 upgrade pre-check at my customer’s site, we ran into the problem mentioned in the title. The so-called “…vmware.h4…” plugin was in a N/A state. In the past this plugin has appeared several times and should be unregister beforehand, this is the VMware Cloud Director Availability Plugin, which cannot be used/registered if the environment does not use the Cloud Director.

You can check the current plugins via at the top left Burger menu -> Administration -> Client Plugins

Since the customer does not have Cloud DIrector in use, we want to unregister this plugin so that it does not get in the way of the vSphere 8 upgrade. You can do this via the ESX CLI interface, first we use the following command to list all existing plugins with “…vmware.h4…”:

/usr/lib/vmware-lookupsvc/tools/lstool.py list --url http://localhost:7090/lookupservice/sdk --product com.vmware.h4

Now copy out the ID of the plugin, see red bar:

This ID including the login data is used in the following “unregister” command:

/usr/lib/vmware-lookupsvc/tools/lstool.py unregister --url http://localhost:7090/lookupservice/sdk --id XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX --user administrator@vsphere.local --password YourPassword!

After successfully unregistering, we restart the vSphere UI Service with the following command:

service-control --restart vsphere-ui

We then take another look at the client plugins and everything should now be clean. Now nothing should stand in the way of the vSphere 8 upgrade.

vSphere UI Client Plugin named N/A after vSphere 8 upgrade

That’s it for this blog post, the content is inspired by William Lam from his blog post: