Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

web client

C# Client is officially dead…

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Many of you have seen the news by now, yesterday VMware announced that the Windows vSphere Client, usually referred to as the C# Client, is dead. Yes indeed, it has been declared dead and going forward will no longer be made available for future release of vSphere. Now this means that it is still available for all releases out there today (up to 6.0) and it will of course stick to the standard support period.

I have always loved the C# Client, but I don’t have mixed feelings on this one… It needs to go, it has been dead for a long time but it was still walking, it is time for a change and time we put it to rest once and for all. Yes it will be painful for some, but I believe this is the only way to move forward.

That also means for you, the admin / consultant, that there needs to be an alternative. Well one has been in the making for a while and that is the HTML-5 based “Host Client”. The Host Client started out as a fling, but as of vSphere 6.0 U2 is part of the default install of ESXi. Personally I really like the client and I can’t wait for it to be feature complete. What I probably like most, besides the slick interface and the speed, is the fact that you can access it from anywhere and that the developers are out there waiting for feedback and ready to engage and improve on what they released. It gets updated very frequently, just visit the Fling’s page (version 8.1 is up there right now) and if you have feedback engage with the engineers through the fling page, or simply drop a note on twitter to Etienne.

But that’s not it, VMware has also shown that it has the intention to get rid of Flash from the Web Client… Again released as a fling and you can download it and try it out as well, next to the regular Web Client. It was recently updated to version 1.6 and believe me when I say that these developers and the PM are also constantly looking for feedback and ways to improve the experience. The message was loud and clear over the past couple of years and they are doing everything they can to improve the Web Client experience, which includes performance and just generic usability aspects.

I would like to ask everyone to try out both the Host Client and the HTML-5 Web Client and leave feedback on those fling pages. What’s working, what is not, what about performance, different devices etc. And if you have strong feelings about the announcement, always feel free to leave a comment here, or on the announcement blog, as PM and Dev will be reading and commenting there where and when needed.

Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode 7 – VSAN Customer Use Cases

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The Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team runs a podcast called Virtually Speaking Podcast every week. This week it was my turn to be a guest on their show. We spoke about VSAN / use cases / all-flash and various other random topic that came up. It was a fun conversation, and I am going to try to tune in more often for sure. (Although I do listen to it every week, I haven’t been able to join live…) Make to sign up, so you don’t miss out on an episode. Listen to Pete Flecha, John Nicholson and I through the below player. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Cool fling: vSphere HTML5 Web Client! #h5client

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Many have asked for it, today the first iteration of the vSphere HTML5 Web Client has been delivered through the VMware Flings website. After the huge success of the ESXi Embedded Host Client (one of my fav flings) it was decided to take the same route for the HTML5 client. The amount of feedback on the ESXi Embedded Host Client fling was overwhelming and it allowed the engineers to incorporate feedback in a very agile while, respond to customers / users requirements literally within days sometimes. Of course the Web Client is a much larger undertaking, but the goal is very much similar. Having said that, it is not fully baked yet, VMware focused on the key workflows first and will expand over time.

Here are list of the most important features/workflows available:

  • VM power operations (common cases)p>
  • VM Edit Settings (simple CPU, Memory, Disk changes)
  • VM Console
  • VM and Host Summary pages
  • VM Migration (only to a Host)
  • Clone to Template/VM
  • Create VM on a Host (limited)
  • Additional monitoring views: Performance charts, Tasks, Events
  • Global Views: Recent tasks, Alarms (view only)
  • Feedback Tool (New feature to collect feedbacks from you)
  • And more.

So if you are interested in testing the latest and willing to provide feedback, start your engines! Note that the product management and engineering team will be closely monitoring twitter, VMTN communities and the feedback loop that is build in to the client itself. Here is how and where you can leave feedback:

I have tried it long before it was even close to ready, and can honestly say that I very much enjoyed how quick it was… it feels to snappy and fresh, yet gets the job done without any nonsense. Great work guys…

This host currently has no network management redundancy

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Bumped in to this a billion times by now, and I wouldn’t recommend applying this in production but for your lab when you need to take clean screenshots it works great. I’ve mentioned this setting before but as it was part of a larger article it doesn’t stand out when searching so I figured I would dedicate a short and simple article to it. Here is what you will need to do if you see the following message in the vSphere Web Client: this host currently has no network management redundancy.

  • Go to your Cluster object
  • Go to Settings
  • Go to “vSphere HA”
  • Click “Edit”
  • Add an advanced setting called “das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning”
  • Set the advanced setting to “true”
  • On each host right click and select “reconfigure for vSphere HA”

This is what it should look like in the UI:
This host currently has no network management redundancy

You can also do this in PowerCLI by the way, note that “Stretched-Bluefin-Frimley” is the name of my cluster.

New-AdvancedSetting -Entity Stretched-Bluefin-Frimley -type ClusterHA -Name "das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning" -Value "true" -force

 

Drag and drop vMotion not working with the 5.5 Web Client?

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A couple of weeks I bumped into this issue where I constantly received a red cross when I wanted to “drag and drop” vMotion a virtual machine using the vSphere 5.5 Web Client. Annoying as it is something which I was waiting for to use as I used this all the time with the vSphere Client. Unfortunately it so happened that I stumbled in to a bug. Apparently when you do a drag and drop migration certain scenarios are filtered out to avoid issues. I guess the filter is too aggressive as today it filters out drag and drop to a host without the use of resource pools. The screenshot shows what this problem looks like in the UI.

I filed the bug of course, but unfortunately it was too late for the fix to make it in to the release. The engineering team has told me they are aiming to fix this in the first update release. So consider this an FYI to avoid getting frustrated around not being able to get this drag and drop thingie working. The support team just published a KB article on this matter as well.