Biggest launch event?
Like a vSphere client for Linux?
Nah - just more cloudy bits.
VMware looks to be launching its long awaited sixth version of vSphere on February 2nd. The Reg is in receipt of a “hold the date” for a February 2nd event. We're also aware of chatter among the VMware faithful that those involved in the vSphere 6 beta are being asked to prepare themselves for “our biggest launch event to date …
The vSphere Web Client already runs on IE7,8,9,10, Firefox and Chrome with Flash 10.1.0 or later, is this the vCentre client? if so, surely this means you can run the client on Linux already? The vCenter Server is also downloadable as a preconfigured Linux based VM I think too. It's already reliable, so I wonder what the news is? I don't know why so many companies like VMware waste so much time supporting old browsers that aren't cross platform.
1 - The vCentre server that runs as a Linux appliance has less features and capacity than the full-blown Windows server based vCentre setup.
2 - If you've ever used the vCentre web interface for more than a few moments, you'll realise that it's a horrible piece of (Flash) software. Why they had to write it as Flash rather than HTML/Javascript application is beyond anyone who uses it. It's slow, buggy and klunky.
Regarding point 2, have you tried the 5.5 web client? We've found it pretty useable as a web client (5.1 was extremely dire for sure). Also don't forget that new features are not being added into the full client, try checking the highest VM hardware version you can set in the full client as one example.
That said, it is frustrating that they take this stance of pushing people down the web client route when plug-ins (like update manager and SRM) are still only available in the full client, I'm guessing this is why VMware have confirmed the full client will be included in v6.