I recently had a "straw that breaks the camel's back" moment with the Flash management of vCenter. I doubt I alone can manage to change VMware's direction on this, but I want to at least protest. Using Flash as a vCenter client is just a terrible decision. Are there really that many vCenter admins that have no access to a Windows PC that can run C+? There's certainly no benefit to me to use Flash over a honest-to-goodness C program. Here are my main issues:
1) It's s-l-o-w. Oh gods is it slow! I've tried different browsers, running things locally, oh is it slow. The C client has no issues in this regard.
2) It's insecure. Flash is a vulnerable software. It's faster to hack a machine through Flash than it is to try and go through any vector.
3) It's kludgy. To get a list of running tasks, you have to go look at that alone on the appropriate cluster. I used to have all running tasks at the bottom of the screen. Now, some show up on the left, but in truncated form.
4) It changes the design layout without providing any benefit. Sure, the old C client was not terribly intuitive, but we all learned it. Now the layout, the content, is often in new places, with no benefit of being there.
5) It fails to connect. I never have issues with the C client, but this one can be very temperamental. Using a browser to connect will sometimes just time out. Refreshing resolves it, but since it is so darn slow, you have to wait quite a while before you get that information.
6) It's a resource hog. The browser alone takes X bytes of RAM/%CPU to run. Then you have the memory horror that is Flash on top of that. I leave the C client running all day, but I always shut down the browser-based Flash client.
7) It's incomplete. Yes, this might get done (updates, etc.) but why saddle us with this awful Flash client, and then still require us to use the C client for things the Flash one cannot do?
😎 Did I mention it was slow? Oh, sweet gum, is it slow!
Maybe the community was clamoring for it, but, please, torpedo this Flash thing and go back to developing a real client.
