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

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

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dennisluvm
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Hi hyvokar,

Are these all from the same moment in time?  Since memory usage can fluctuate wildly (as seen on the graph), depending on the exact moment in time it could change drastically.

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hyvokar
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Yes, they are same time, excluding the last one, but it still showed different values.

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hyvokar
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next question:

fuck-web-client9.jpg

So do I have vmware tools installed or not ?


Next question:

Recent tasks say:
fuck-web-client10.jpg

monitor -> tasks&events say:

fuck-web-client11.jpg'


So is it migrating, or is it cancelled?

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dennisluvm
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I can ask about the VMware tools thing.

Regarding the Relocate task,

1) is it still the vSphere 6.5 environment you mentioned before?

2) Did this situation resolve itself after some period of time?

3) If yes, how long did it take?

4) If no, what ended up happening? For example, did in recent tasks it stay stuck at 29% forever?

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hyvokar
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1)New cluster is 6.5, old one is 5.5. Both connected to vcenter 6.5

2) Not sure ? After ~8 hours the "Recent tasks" changed it's status to match "tasks & events" (cancel requested), and after 24hours it's still at the same state.

3) see 2

4) see 2

So I'm not quite sure, if it's migrating, cancelling or cancelled.

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hyvokar
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fuck-web-client12.jpg

Ok, this is starting to seriously piss me off. Why am I sometimes shown, that there is a more/third disk(s) and sometimes not in a VM Hardware box?

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dennisluvm
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I'll pass this feedback onto our UX team who is looking at this.

To clarify, it sounds like the issue is that the "VM hardware portlet" on the leftside of your screenshot makes it look like there are only 2 disks, while the "Edit Settings" dialog shows that there are 3, am I correct?

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hyvokar
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Hi!

That's correct.

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hyvokar
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Hi!

When browsing datastore files, sorting does not stay the same after you delete for example a folder or move in to a folder.

vc6.5 with webclient

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hyvokar
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Hi!


Could we have an option to remove orphaned VMs in Web Client?

Now I have to fire up PowerCLI to do that.

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dennisluvm
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"So do I have vmware tools installed or not ?"

Questions:

a) Can you share what the Guest OS is (version helps)?

b) Did you recently install VMware tools onto the Guest OS?

c) I was told that it's possible that restarting the "vmtoolsd" service in the Guest OS may remove the issue.

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dennisluvm
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Can you paste a screenshot of the Action Menu (Right Click) you get on an orphaned VM, for our reference?

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hyvokar
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Already removed the orphaned ones. Everything was grayed out in the Action Menu. Could not even drag & drop them to different folder so I could've removed the folders with the VMs as instructed in some KB.

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hyvokar
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While migrating VMs "details" column in Recent tasks is empty. However, details are shown in monitor -> tasks&events -> tasks.

Also, selection of columns in "recent tasks" reset every time you restart the browsers.

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dennisluvm
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Hi hyvokar,

If you have further feedback, you can send me a direct message and then I can provide you my email address to make it easier to communicate.

I've noted both of these issues and we'll see if we can fix them in the HTML5 based vSphere Client.

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ipkpjersi
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I don't wanna be mean or anything but the HTML client is so annoying to use. When I create a VM and want to attach VMDKs, I have to create them as thin-provisioned with less than the remaining amount of space on datastore1 (1TB SSD for ds1 with 70GB remaining) so 16GB thin for each of my 6TB HDDs (even though they are BLANK), then manually change them to the full size AFTER I have specified that they are thin then change them to thick (if I so desire, which I do). After I did this and specified to create each new VMDK on each individual datastore (ds2 through ds7), I find out that it put all the VMDKs on ds1... really? That is not what I asked for at all.

Then there's another longstanding issue where if I edit a VM multiple times, I have to relaunch my browser because I keep getting this error thrown up for no reason: http://i.imgur.com/ikyZM6x.png

So annoying. I want to love the client but it's just so hard when these annoying things happen. So frustrating for what is supposed to be an enterprise product. Both of these bugs happen on Firefox and Chrome. This is practically unusable.

I really want to love this client but you guys are making it so hard. VMware, please make this web client something we can all love.

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hyvokar
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How do you migrate lest say 50VMs out of 100 from one host to another with web client? Didn't find any other way that migrating them one by one.

NVM: Found it. Altough for some reason "recent tasks" freezed and doesn't show any actions any more.

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dennisluvm
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Strange errors like that are one of the reasons we're trying to step away from the Flash plugin, but that's one I haven't seen before.

Can you describe a little more about this VMDK attaching issue? It sounds like:

1) You created a VM

2) You want to add multiple harddisks on it using the new HTML5 based vSphere Client for vCenter (or are you speaking about the Host Client for managing single hosts?)

3) You do so by going to the VM and clicking "Edit Settings" and adding new disk

4) When adding the new disk, you specify that it should be Thin provisioned, and the Location should be on another Datastore (not "Store with the virtual machine").

Please correct me if my understanding is wrong.

Questions:

a) What versions are you on: Host, vCenter if applicable?

b) Did this flow work differently on the Desktop client?

c) I didn't quite understand the situation with your datastore's free space and your Thin/Thick decisions.  It sounded like your ds1 is a 1TB disk with 70 GB remaining, and you want to create additional VM harddisks which are 6 TBs?  I'm sure I missed something here.

d) What prevents you from specifying Thick provisioning when creating the VM: does the UI report an error?  What error?

e) When you do change the location (in Step 4), does this new location fail to hold, and the VMDK actually ends up in the same location as the root disk?

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ipkpjersi
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Hello,

I will provide as much information as I can think of. I have a server with a 1TB SSD that ESXi installed onto combined with a datastore with 3 VMs - two tiny VMs and one main VM. I had to re-create my main VM as it got corrupted and required a complete installation. I also have 6 of the same 6TB disk that I use for RAID 10 on that main VM. I create a thick lazy-zero VMDK for the OS on the SSD DS (ds1) however, no matter how I attempted to create VMDKs on the other DSes (ds2 through ds7 all being the HDDs, I attempted thick and thin VMDKs), the web client always put the VMDK files on the original SSD DS if it was thin and if it was thick it simply would not work and would say not enough space (because it attempted to put the VMDKs on ds1 despite me specifying ds2 through ds7 for each of the VMDKs). I have done this same setup before using the web client on a much older version however on this newer version (1.19.0) on ESXi 6.0U3 with the latest patch released on June 6, it does not seem to be work properly anymore. My workaround was to use the desktop client to create thin VMDKs on each of the datastores which did work as expected unlike the web client, although it is unfortunate that I could not create thick VMDKs because of the 2TB VMDK limit of the desktop client. It didn't matter if I attempted to create the VMDKs on the other datastores during creation of the VM or after the VM was already created, the web client still had the same bug - it always put them on /ds1/VMName/VMName_disknumber.vmdk.

As for my other bug, I hope that you are able to replicate (and eventually fix) that as well, as pretty much every time I edit a VM's settings too frequently, it ends up giving an integer overflow as seen in my screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/ikyZM6x.png.


As for the "flash plugin", I wasn't aware that the HTML 5 client (v1.19.0) made use of a Flash plugin? Am I reporting these errors in the right thread?

Thanks.

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dennisluvm
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Hi ipkpjersi,

Thank you for the details.  From the screenshot and description you're definitely talking about the single host management client, we generally call the Host Client.  We oftentimes have mixups between Host Client and the vCenter based Web Client and new HTML5 based vSphere Client for vCenter.

We often have different bugs and such from each one so thank you for the details.  I will check on this, but 1.19 does look like you're pretty up to date.

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