A long long time ago I stumbled across a project within VMware which allowed you to manage ESXi through a client which was running on ESXi itself. Basically it presented an html interface for ESXi not unlike the MUI we had in the old days. It was one of those pet-projects being done in spare time by a couple of engineers which for various reasons at the time was never completed. The concept/idea however did not die fortunately. Some very clever engineers felt it was time to have that “embedded host client” for ESXi and started developing something in their spare time and this is the result.
I am not going to describe it in detail as William Lam has an excellent post on this great fling already. The installation is fairly straight forward, basically a vib you need to install. No rocket science. When installed you can manage various aspects of your hosts and VMs including:
- VM operations (Power on, off, reset, suspend, etc).
- Creating a new VM, from scratch or from OVF/OVA (limited OVA support)
- Configuring NTP on a host
- Displaying summaries, events, tasks and notifications/alerts
- Providing a console to VMs
- Configuring host networking
- Configuring host advanced settings
- Configuring host services
Is that cool or what? Head over to the Fling website and test it. Make sure to provide feedback when you have it as the engineers are very receptive and always looking to improve their fling. Personally I hope that this fling will graduate and will be added to ESXi by default, or at a minimum be fully supported! Excellent work Etienne Le Sueur and George Estebe!
Very interresting 🙂 thanks for share
I remember when I managed my Vmware infrastructure in 2003 with 900 VMs and 30 servers without vcenter. The times is changing 🙂
Great ideia! I will test this in my home lab right now. Congratulations team.
Awesome!
Finally you wouldn’t need the vSphere Client at all, even when vcenter is down! (well, what was this update server thing on windows again?)
I would vote for official support!
Beyond badass. It would be awesome if you could go into the DCUI for secure environments and turn it off/on easily. That way it would only be an attack surface when it was really needed. This needs to go to production, and kill off any host client requirement.
Kindpow you are the greatest