# adding vcenter to tower caused hosts displayed with ids

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/adding-vcenter-to-tower-caused-hosts-displayed-with-ids/25856>\
**Category:** AWX Project\
**Tags:** vmware, awx\
**Created:** [October 29, 2017, 11:19am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/adding-vcenter-to-tower-caused-hosts-displayed-with-ids/25856 "2017-10-29T11:19:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Oguz\_Yarimtepe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/d07c76/32.png) [@Oguz\_Yarimtepe](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Oguz_Yarimtepe)\
**Post date:** [October 29, 2017, 11:19am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/adding-vcenter-to-tower-caused-hosts-displayed-with-ids/25856/1 "2017-10-29T11:19:50Z")

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I added VMWare VCenter credential type to AWX interface and also added source of my VCenter. I can see the vms on my VCenter but all are imported with their name\_id format which i don’t want. How can i tell AWX (Tower) to import VCenter vms with just their name or display them as their names?

I checked the instance filters part but couldn’t find the way to tell AWX import just names.

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**Author:** ![matburt](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/matburt/32/3612_2.png) [@matburt](https://forum.ansible.com/u/matburt)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2017, 12:12pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/adding-vcenter-to-tower-caused-hosts-displayed-with-ids/25856/2 "2017-10-30T12:12:25Z")

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Interesting, we import vmware hosts on our own internal infrastructure and this doesn’t happen (it’d be seriously annoying if it did). You might ask the ansible core channel(s) to see what they recommend… We pull in the ansible vmware inventory file into AWX: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/contrib/inventory/vmware\_inventory.py](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/contrib/inventory/vmware_inventory.py)

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**Author:** ![treyphan77](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ea5d25/32.png) [@treyphan77](https://forum.ansible.com/u/treyphan77)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2017, 4:30pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/adding-vcenter-to-tower-caused-hosts-displayed-with-ids/25856/3 "2017-11-03T16:30:08Z")

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Still very new to this but I had the same problem and found this in the ini

[https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/6bc3f98eee2b1f1496d35aa0357b924ab0cb7d0f/contrib/inventory/vmware\_inventory.ini#L51](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/6bc3f98eee2b1f1496d35aa0357b924ab0cb7d0f/contrib/inventory/vmware_inventory.ini#L51)

I am messing around with different options to see what I can come up with as a work around.
