Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Using the vCenter Appliance for the Web Client?

· ·

Today on twitter there was a discussion around having an appliance for the vSphere Web Client. I didn’t get the question as there’s already a vCenter Appliance out there. Apparently not everyone realised that the Web Client is part of the vCenter Appliance. On top of that you could even split out the components and use the vCenter Appliance just for Web Client functionality. I remembered seeing an article from one of my colleagues not too long ago. I dug up the links and here they are. I included a short snippet so you know what to expect. These articles are by Michael Webster so all credits go to him:

Deploy vSphere Web Client without Additional Windows Server License

Prior to running through the steps below you should have downloaded and deployed the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCVA) from the VMware web site. This process assumes you already have the VCVA connected to the network and configured with the correct timezone already. To de-register the local embedded vCenter System and to register an existing vCenter Server with the vSphere Web Client do the following….

This is the first step you can take to get the vSphere Web Client up and running. But what if you want to provide some additional redundancy. Or what if you have dozens of people literally using the Web Client and want to add some load balancing? Well Michael thought about that as well and came up with a cool solution for this.

Increase vSphere Web Client Availability and Scalability for Enterprise Environments

In the above design I’ve chosen to use the vCenter Virtual Appliance with the vCenter Services disabled to act as the vSphere Web Client Servers. I’ve used a F5 BIG-IP LTM VE to provide load balancing for the vSphere Web Client User access to the vSphere Web Client Servers, as well as for the vCenter Servers to access the vSphere License Plug-in. You can use any load balancer that will successfully load balance HTTPS traffic on port 9443, which is the port the vSphere Web Client uses.

I think this is a cool solution, and considering the Web Client is the way forward it is definitely an option exploring. I do want to point out that this has more than likely not been explicitly tested by VMware and I am uncertain if it is supported. I have reached out to our vCenter experts however to comment on it.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. There should be NO reason why we can’t do this — have our regular vCenter server for VUM and similar things and the appliance just for Web access to vCenter for basic stuff…

    Thank you, Tom

  4. There are still many tasks that cannot be completed in the web client, but I like the direction it’s going.

  6. I like this, very helpful, thank you very much for writing about it, I will definitely use it this way.

    I imagine that one must still create access groups etc. for people’s permissions to do one thing or another, e.g. start/stop VMs but not add virtual hardware or not have access to all the VMs e.g. access only to Windows guests not to Linux guests…correct??

    Thank you, Tom

  7. This is a little off topic, but related to vCenter HA. We’ve grown to a size now where we want a dedicated cluster for just infrastructure related VMs. What is the best practice to move the vCenter VM itself to the new cluster without causing too much fuss? This is in the same site, same networks, just different clusters and luns.

  8. That depends on the fact if you have one or multiple vCenter Servers. If you only have 1 it is easiest to create a LUN which is presented to both clusters and simply vMotion it to the other cluster and then Storage vMotion it.

  9. I was going to do that but I didn’t know what the behavior would be when you try to remove the data store. We have a lot of Luns and I’m really trying to avoid an APD scenario. The mask claim rules procedure looks like a huge pain.

  10. Trevor, in my experience so long as you remove the datastore cleanly then there are no issues. Where we have had problems is on a storage array failure when there was simply no way that the LUNs were ever going to come back, but even those were fixed via “esxcfg-rescan -u”.

  11. Do you know of a way to remove multiple data stores at once without a rescan between each one? I like your idea.

  12. VMware support is telling me to use datastore browser to download the vCenter VM to my desk and then upload it to the other cluster.

    This sounds ok for other VMs, but is this ok for vCenter?

  13. Just downloaded vcenter appliance 5.1… the appliance interface https://10.110.100.19:5480 shows that the server and inventory services are running but the web client is stopped and it won’t start no matter how many time you click start or reboot the VM. Any ideas?