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Awesome fling: ESXi Embedded Host Client

Duncan Epping · Aug 13, 2015 ·

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!

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Related

Management & Automation, Server, Various esxi, host client, manage, vcenter, vSphere

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Comments

  1. seitosana says

    13 August, 2015 at 15:29

    Very interresting 🙂 thanks for share

  2. Javier Galvez says

    13 August, 2015 at 15:32

    I remember when I managed my Vmware infrastructure in 2003 with 900 VMs and 30 servers without vcenter. The times is changing 🙂

  3. wagnerbandeira says

    13 August, 2015 at 15:58

    Great ideia! I will test this in my home lab right now. Congratulations team.

  4. David says

    13 August, 2015 at 23:04

    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!

  5. Brandon Rice says

    15 August, 2015 at 06:19

    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.

  6. Alex says

    15 October, 2015 at 15:11

    Kindpow you are the greatest

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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