Plain Virtualization

Today marks the announcement from VMware to end the availability in future release of vSphere Client for Windows also known as the C# Client by many.  The last version and will be vSphere Client 6.0.  Any version of vSphere alongside with support will still be released. With this, there will only be one client moving forward in the next release of vSphere (lightly announced in Aug 2016 during VMworld as usual).  As also stated there will be two edition of Web Client in next release namely: Flex and HTML5. There will be plugins from other vendors that will not work since the time to create support for HTML5 will take times, so it makes sense for those who are dependent on those plugin to utilize the Flex.  For users who are not using any Flex dependent plugin, you can fully utilize the HTML5 based web client completely and enjoy the requirement of using Flash and away from the security vulnerability that comes with it. Currently there is a Fling of the HTML5 c...

So the new vSphere 6.0 has release, what is great on one of the functionality is the web client.  It has always be crawling since it was introduced in vSphere 5.0.  In vSphere 6.0, it was promised with great performance improvement and it was great! On day 0 daily operations activity, accessing the VM console is essential and often used.  When you launch the vSphere Web Client, you will be at the login page.  Below you will see the link to download the Client Integration Plug-in as shown below: After installing, you will be able to access the VM console after logging in.  Upon login, you will see the screen below when a VM is selected: Above you see the screenshot taken from Hands-on-Lab.  To access a VM console you will have selected the VM and on the right you will see the above.  Clicking on "Launch Console", will launch the VM console in a new tab\window of your browser.  However this link is invalid!  So how are you going to ...

Constantly even myself, we found difficult to setup the vSphere web client.  Often I always forgot what to do again and again from vSphere 5.0, 5.1 and now 5.5.  I decide to just document this down so that the web client can work as a breeze.   The first thing after setting up your vCenter 5.5, you would need to: Log into the web client using the SSO administrator: Change the password for the SSO administrator account (administrator@vsphere.local) Change the password expiry to from the default 90 days to your requirement (Note: '0' will not work although the message state so when you click on the textbox, instead do a 9999 if you require no expiry. Refer to KB ) Add your domain into the Identity Sources under Administration>Single-Sign-On>Configuration Set it to Default Domain by clicking on the Global Icon Add your accounts or groups to be SSO administrator going to Administrators under Groups in Administration>Single-Sign-On>Users and Gr...

vCenter Server 5.x does not function correctly when installed with Oracle 11.2.0.3 Patch 10 or later. When creating a VM you receive the below error messsage: " An internal error occurred in the vSphere Client. Details: Object reference not set to an instance of an object." This is an alert been raised to customer using Oracle 11.2.0.3 for their vCenter database not to upgrade Oracle patch 10 or later to avoid any issues. If the customer has already upgraded and encountered this issue, the only option is to roll back to pre-patch backup versions of the database. There is currently no resolution.  You can refer to the KB below. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2039874

There are a few good resources on using the vCenter Web Client.  One of them contains the use of the whole web client interface which you can find here . This KB states the requirements for the Web Client. This blog shows you the installation of Web Client. To access the web client the URL address would be as follows with the default port: https:// :(hostname or ip):9443/vsphere-client Below is a video on a simple setup of the Web Client and installation.  Do note that the Web Client would require Adobe Flash to access via any of the web browsers namely Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Features now available in Web Client but not on C# Client vSphere Replication vMotion with no shared storage SR-IOV, BDPU, Port allocation to Elastic Network Healthcheck Backup and Rollback for vDS Port mirroring (IPFX) and Netflow new enhancements for vDS (ESPAN, RSPAN) I came across this blog post on the vDS enhancements on vSphere 5.1.  Do take a look. 1...