vSphere 5 – New vSphere Web Client

With the announcement of vSphere 5 this week brings many new features, I attend to be picking of features one by one and looking at them with a bit more depth.

With vSphere 5 is a completely new vSphere vCenter web interface, previously the web interface was slow and extremely limited with what could be done with it, to be honest I don’t think I ever really used it apart from when I couldn’t get near a Windows PC to start the vSphere Client.

The new web client is written in Adobe Flex the same as the View and vCloud Director user interfaces, I believe in the long term this is the way we will see the full client heading. The new interface isn’t designed to fully replace the functionality of the Windows Client at the moment but has most functionality that you will use from an administration perspective.

The new web interface is installed as a separate component to the vCenter, also notice the shiny new installer!

The vSphere Web Client (server) can be installed on a server with network connectivity to the vCenter, in my demo lab I have it installed on my vCenter but I haven’t found the best practise regarding this yet.

Once the web client server is installed you need to configure it to be able to see your vCenter, this is achieved by going to the URL below direct from the server where the Web Client is installed.

https://127.0.0.1:9443/admin-app

Once at the above page you need to register your vCenter with the web client server

We can now see the registered vCenter in the list

Once you have registered the vCenter you are able to login using the web client from any machine with Adobe Flash 10.1.0 installed. The web client is accessed from the following address

https://%5Bwebclientserver%5D:9443/vsphere-client/

In the bottom left you can install the client integration plug-in, this is a Windows only plugin, this is responsible for the console view I haven’t found any other uses for it yet.  Once in you should find most day to day tasks can be completed here.

Creating a new virtual machine

Looking at performance

Editing a VM

Resource Management

Conclusion

Being a Mac user an improved web client is a very welcome addition for me, after using it for a while I feel I could happily do most daily admin with it. Moving forward if the Windows client were to reach end of life I would have to see how some of the more complex elements would port over to this web client.

There are some nice features like the arrows in the top right of the windows can be used to minimise a task into the work in progress panel while you do something else

I would hope to see cross platform support for the client integration plug-in in a future release as well.