vSphere Web Client is so bad that my experience managing and supporting VMware has turn to....

[kgottleib]

Purpose of this post is simple and obvious...  bring back development to thick client.  THANKS!

[ggathagan]

This won't help your lack of a test environment, but there's a work-around for use with 5.x systems:

New HTML5 Embedded Host Client for ESXi | virtuallyGhetto

[Morgenstern72]

Amazon is the next company that stops Flash: http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/20/amazon-com-will-stop-accepting-flash-ads-on-september-1/

I think that Flash will stop to exist in the next 3-6 months. There will just be no browser support anymore. What will VMWare do next? Cling to the one exotic browser that runs with an outdated version of Flash to have 2 years to develop a new web client as stated some months ago? Or just invest some weeks and bring the native client up to date?

[wyoITguy]

VMware obviously does not care what we, their customers think.  They will continue to implement sub-par management products as they have for the past 2+ years.  I've now heard rumors that VMware is also planning on switching to a subscription license model.  That is the last straw for me, I am evaluating Hyper-V and various other hyper-visors in house and plan to move our 30+ hosts and 500 VM's and planned VDI project to another vendor.  VMware has moved from being a Cadillac product to a Pinto, and I'm not paying Cadillac prices for an inferior product. 

VMware you listening yet?

[unsichtbare]

[wyoITguy]

Apparently the Web Client knows I'm annoyed with it, here's one of the persistent screens I keep seeing today...hopefully a reboot of the underlying Windows OS will fix it as it's useless in this state...not to mention I had an alarm that would NOT allow me to acknowledge nor clear in the Web Client, but magically it works fine the C# client...and VMware wonders why we hate the damn thing:

[David_Y]

Been a while since I've dropped by.  Anyone heard if vmware is going to relent and keep the C# as the primary administrative tool and keep developing a HTML 5 based secondary tool?  Yeah right I know.... Seems like a dream doesn't it?

[unsichtbare]

In the "old days," one could maintain the reasonable expectation that: If I made no changes to my ESXi Hosts/vCenter, then the vSphere Client would work.

Now, because of VMware's insistence upon depending on external vendors products that they have no control over (Chrome, Firefox, IE) - I have no reasonable expectation that I will be able to access the environment from day-to-day!

I might come into work tomorrow, or try to log-in because of an emergency, and find that my browser is no longer compatible with vSphere! This happened just on Tuesday, when I discovered that Chrome version 45 required me to download a new version of the Client Integration Plugin (which took 7+ minutes to install). I was thinking: "What if this was a mission-critical emergency and I was waiting not only for the download, but also the incredibly slow install, before I could react to correct the situation"

We face the very real possibility that, while vSphere 6.X is still the current version, major browser platforms will discontinue support for flash entirely, leaving us with no way to access the Dreaded Web-Client and configure things that cannot be managed with the C# Client!

[jdrickman]

For what it's worth, a little personal history. I have used VMWare products personally and professionally since 1999, starting with the original release of the workstation product. I took a company 100% virtual on the old GSX product in late 2002, and quickly adopted ESX shortly thereafter. I have used VMWare in large and small environments, ranging from single hosts to hundreds, for well over a decade. You might describe me as a loyal customer and early adopter. All that said, to keep things as simple as I can, 5.5u2 is the end of the line for me at this point. The web client is not acceptable, and while it pains me to consider alternatives...it is important for VMWare to understand something. You are not special anymore. Hypervisors have been commoditized. Unlike in the past, you CAN be replaced, and quite easily. You still have an edge when it comes to manageability and overall feature set, but the current direction with regards to management tools and interface are rendering that edge irrelevant, as it becomes more and more difficult and time consuming to take advantage of that feature set. Your customers are speaking to you. You can choose to ignore us if you wish, but we have alternatives, and many of them are free, or have already been purchased due to them being bundled in base operating systems. Many of us have run KVM, Xen, and HyperV environments alongside VMWare in production, and know full well that while there are some tradeoffs, all are perfectly workable solutions. If you surrender your competitive advantage in some bizarre effort to provide a solution to an imaginary problem, you might find out just how portable VMs really are across platforms. Sure, there will be large customers who will move slowly, masking this effect somewhat, but it would be foolish for you as a company to believe that you can stop that momentum once it starts. The very inertia that makes you the incumbent today, could turn against you and leave you wondering what happened. To put it more plainly, you exist because system administrators, engineers, and architects preferred you because you made their lives easier. You're pissing them off now, and making their lives more difficult. How do you really think this is going to end?

[kgottleib]

Thanks for your input on this thread, we have a lot in common only I started a couple years after but in the same fashion, GSX to ESX.   Been in the v-game for 12 years now.  Earlier on this thread VMware product folks were involved, but they have long since abandoned replying from what I can tell.  You know the story..  the more intelligent replies the better, I'm hoping this becomes the most viewed thread in the history of VMTN.      

[Chris212]

First answer of the vmware team was in June 2014 when they acknowledge this issue.

Now we are in september 2015 and the performance issues are still exactly the same and the C# Client was not improved as well.

I agree with everything which has already be said, especially that you should dig a hole and bury this web client. I am even not sure if a new htlm5 web client from scratch would be a good solution.

Please, improve the C# client. The web client will always be slower no matter what you do.

[AlphapIT]

When I think of vSphere Web Client, I am reminded of this

If vmware doesn't listen to its customers, and continues to push a web client that runs on dead programming languages.  The Web Client will be the downfall of vmware.  Customers are already starting to move away from vmware for companies that listen to their users feedback.

[dwigz]

It does not fix the larger problem, that VMware should have HTML 5 clients across the board by now.  But the link below show how you can add some resources to Flash to make your life a little easier working.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=210609...

[adamjg]

I definitely see an improvement in the web client in 6.0 vs. 5.5.  It crashes much faster now.

[unsichtbare]

The Web Client is as useless as ever, and more effectively useless too!

Recently, Google Chrome (the only browser known to be able to run the Web Client reliably) updated to 45. As a result of this update, I had to search for and install a new Client Integration Plugin from VMware. Once I found the file and downloaded it (for the sake of argument, let's say this process was instantaneous) the install took over 10 minutes on a quad-core I7 workstation!

What if my virtualized systems ran something like the FAA and I needed to log-on to prevent planes from crashing? Now, VMware depends on external vendors for the Web Client and I can not be guaranteed of my immediate ability to log in to vSPhere on a day to day bases! I might wake up tomorrow and find that Chrome no longer supports Flash at all.

I will not upgrade Virtual Machines beyond Version 8, and if VMware continues on this path, I will not Qualify future vSphere versions for my company's use, and we will not recommend future versions to our customers either!

The Chrome 45 thing put quite a scare in me, when I realized that I might not be able to immediately access certain key vSphere features (like SSO) that might prevent me from effectively managing my infrastructure - all based on a browser update that VMware does not control. I suspect that if a similar situation had occurred two years ago, we would not have Qualified vSphere 5.5 either!

Live, learn, and become more skeptical!

[Ron_Hancock]

I stumbled across this thread looking for something else and disturbed that after more than a year of user complaints, VMware is still ignoring it's customers. I am another who finds the web client useless for almost everything. It is slow and unresponsive for the most part and completely flaky. I hope that someday they will get their heads out of their behinds and just update the fat client and be done with this who web client fiasco....And that is my 2 cents worth.

[kgottleib]

When vendors don't listen to the customers, and they force garbage on you like the web client, the appeal is lost, and when the appeal is lost, customers start evaluating the total cost  with a microscope, and after this happens, well, this is the end result:

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-dumps-vmware-esxi-for-kvm-2015-10

[AlphapIT]

Ha, that is awesome.  It would have been better if the article said they were switching because of the Web Client :smileygrin:  I have come to the conclusion that VMWare will probably never respond to this thread, or consider listening to our concerns.  I myself have looked into the KVM software and I am quite impressed.  When my VMWare contract is up I will most likely not renew.  There is no point for me to continue to pay for maintenance when I am no longer receiving updates that I can use or deploy.  As for the support side, my environment is not that complicated.  And the VCenter server, well that POS is on its third rebuild already.  First was to move from the the appliance version to the Windows version to get the update manager, the second time it was to rebuild the Windows version after the SQL express database kept maxing out the size and I had other weird issues going on.  If I rebuild a 4th time it will be to downgrade to 5.0 or switch to KVM.

[kgottleib]

AlphapIT - you can use VUM with the VCSA, but it needs a windows server to install it in, but it can leverage the SQL express during the installation, it merely connects to the vCenter APIs and will work just fine against the VCSA.

I converted 2 KVM environments to VMware about 4 years ago, and the company was very happy with it despite the cost, and the reason?  Because the customer's engineers preferred the ease of management from the vSphere client, and were not scripting gurus.

now that the standard vSphere client is being moved away from, there is no more ease of management. 

Hence, you will see many organizations leaving VMware for other products. 

More sophisticated users will look at KVM, and those not so sophisticated will leverage HyperV. 

I have made a career off VMware over the past 10 years, so this is a genuine tragedy for me, the creator of this post.  Which is why I launched this post in the first place.

Early on within this thread VMware product manager was chiming in but I haven't heard from anyone from VMware is quite some time on this issue.  It would appear that the marching orders are in place for better or for worse within VMware internally.. and it is marching to a drum beat with no rhythm..  haha

[unsichtbare]

I agree with kgottleib and AlphapIT (mostly). Yes the VUM is fully compatible with the VCSA, and in vSPhere 6, quite easy to configure. Moreover, CLI patching of hosts is very easy.

I see the VCSA as a very positive development with vSphere, in spite of the Web Client fiasco. I also see the attraction to KVM (or ever Hyper-V).

My take (and opinion) is that, while the C# Client still works, I am going to use the VCSA and the C# Client, while holding my VMs at Virtual Machine HW Version 8.

[jjardina]

I just installed vSphere 6 in my DR environment.  I am sorry that I moved my hardware to 10 on the few VMs I have permanently running in that datacenter.   The web client is slow and I randomly lose view of my hosts.  Not the VMs themselves, but the hosts.  Refresh, refresh, refresh, they are back, go to do a storage operation, no hosts found...  Go to C# client, everything is there and never disappears.  I cannot work in web GUI because it keeps losing my hosts, have to resort to C# client to do any meaningful operation and of course, it doesn't have all the features that 5.0 had in the client.  Definitely a move in the wrong direction.  Web client in vSphere 6 is not stable enough to use in production.  I can't believe VMware cut their own legs off with these stupid decisions.  If it is not ready for production, don't force users to use it.  It is that simple really.  This doesn't help my problem at all.  I need to upgrade, but the fix I need in the upgrade is not worth the management headaches of being forced into a buggy tool creates.