VMware updates vSphere, recommends new security fixes VMware has released a second update to vSphere 5.5. The headline news in the new release is that hosts can now run up to six terabytes of RAM. And yes, we do mean terabytes. vCenter Server can now support Oracle 12c, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Those considering hybrid cloud get to …
I remember having sort of high hopes when word first came out that a web client was coming, but it's just been crap. As a linux user for 18 years I'd rather use windows and the .NET client (normally interface with vCenter through Citrix XenApp + .NET client on windows because the vmware client on Linux Xenapp client doesn't work very well).
I know that the latest VM hardware version 12 requires the web client so for the 4 VMs (windows 2012) that need this hardware version I'm forced to use the web client when making configuration changes. It's painful. It sucks (I've only tried it on windows). I have a pair of ESXi 5.5 hosts (about to add a few more) the rest of the servers are ESX 4.1U3 (good 'ol thick ESX I like that much more than ESXi).
Fortunately even today I hardly ever have to touch the web client. Maybe by the time I have to regularly interact with it they will have it fixed, yeah probably not.
I read somewhere recently that vmware was (or perhaps has) turned the web client into an .exe instead of a browser plugin based interface.
Totally agree. Not always using a Windows desktop, I had high hopes when they announced the new web interface to vCentre. Then I got to try it... My desktop machine isn't exactly ancient, and the vCentre server itself isn't slow either, so what did they do to make the interface so darn slow? I sometimes resort back to the Windows client via RDP (despite the dire warnings) just to get a sane level of performance.
Epic fail by VMware.
It really brought home to me just how shite the web-client is when I needed to upload a disc image through the browser - special plugin needed for it. That in itself isn't great, but the bit that really did it for me was the plugin download being 80MB. A friggin 80MB browser plugin?
The web-interface sucks in general too. Thankfully don't have to use it too often
The dedicated client worked well - it fell foul of proxies with the performance graphing and there were some other shortfalls, but on the whole, it was good, and had been for many years.
The web client is a dog, the deployment of SSO services a minefield, and the Console Plugin a PITA that I can't get to work in Chrome - even though it's a supported browser.
Considering how 'clever' the ESX product is, how can the web client be plagued with 'dumb' problems?
How is that VMWare can make a piece of software -the hypervisor- so clever and sophisticated that makes other low level software such as an operating system believe it is running on a physical machine and on the other hand can't do a decent web app?
If half of the smarts devoted to the hypervisor were devoted to the client tools the result should surely be something that runs across all modern browsers without depending on plugins whose life cycle is already known to be shorter than the VMs they are hosting.
Come on, you can still install OS/2 Warp on VMWare (deprecated, but it should work) but you can't manage it without having a specific Windows version, browser version and plugin(s) version?
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