Thoughts on ESXi Host Client?

[vjagdale]

The VMware product design team is trying to understand the differences in the usage of host client UI and vSphere UI. Comment below if you are interested in sharing your thoughts on it. 

[Kinnison]

Hi,

Could you please be a little less generic?

The inconsistencies between the GUI of the ESXi / vCenter objects are numerous, some have been illustrated in the personal BLOGs of several of your colleagues (some of them are active here) some others have been discussed here, even in recent times.

Regards,
Ferdinando

[StephenMoll]

I think she is asking about the differences in the ways the two clients are used. I.e. If you have access to both, what would make you choose one UI over the other? I suspect that they are aware of the actual different between the two.

[Kinnison]

Hi,

I beg your pardon but personally I have some doubts, I am not speaking of "differences" but of "inconsistencies" that force you to use one or the other of the two objects in order to achieve an intended result. If I want to name a vSS object in order to make its purpose more intuitive I have to use the ESXi object GUI because the vCenter object GUI prevents me, I wish I could use only one GUI instead of two.

This IMHO defines itself as an inconsistency.

Regards,
Ferdinando

[vjagdale]

Sorry, I should have added more context. The VMware design team is aware of the actual differences, it is just that the team wants to hear from customers - their feedback about the experience of using both. If you have thoughts to share on this topic, the team would love to get on a quick zoom call with you. Appreciate the responses so far.  

[stadi13]

Hi Varsha

my opinion is that the esx host client is still on the vSphere 5.5 level. It is not intuitive and looks still like the adobe flash version of vSphere Web Client.

Regards

Daniel

[Kinnison]

Hi,

I think I understand your question, so I'll try to answer it,

Someone thought to add the Italian language to the ESXi object GUI, too bad they did it in a way neither complete nor accurate and basing the selection on "cookies" and with preference to the "browser default", thus whenever the "cookies" are deleted you find yourself with the GUI of ESXi objects in "Italian" and the GUI of many other products in "English". Translating the label "free" intended as "free disk space" in "gratuito" or "libera" or translating the label "Number of displays" as "Numero di visualizzazioni" it does not make sense, it would have been enough to involve some of your native Italian-speaking colleagues to take a look at it before introducing this functionality.

I have noticed that in the most recent versions of the ESXi / vCenter product here and there "some color detail" and "visual effect" have been added, but no one seems to have noticed that in certain menus the contents are presented in light gray on a white background that is difficult to read or that certain fields would "appear" pre-populated while they are not at all (they are "blank") and this in some cases is a source of confusion.

We could also discuss those reported "error" that are so generic as to be of no practical use, like "a parameter is not valid without specifying which" and therefore, to understand something I have to read several LOGs. And what to say about the most recent version of the vCenter object, if you want to edit the network settings you have to use "firefox" otherwise with latest EDGE / Chrome a "black box" is presented.

These are all things that for better or for worse have been discussed in this same forum.

Having said that and from my humble point of view, without any polemical intent, it would not be better to remedy the "differences", "inconsistencies" and defects" that you already know and then evaluating with your customer how much this contributes to the improvement of the user experience?

Regards,
Ferdinando

[pmichelli]

I use both and would be happy to hop on a call.  Primarily use vCenter to manage the hosts but we have a few outliers not attached to vCenter that I manage with the host client.  I'd love to see improvements to the host client

[Kinnison]

@vjagdale, good afternoon,

Speaking of user experience in using the GUI of an ESXi host, for my curiosity I have deployed a host running ESXi 8.0 and what I have to say, the translation of the Italian language is questionable exactly as before, and apart from a different combination of colors and a few more pleasant icons, everything has (practically) remained as before, including being able to mess with the management of the aspects related to the netowking of the aforementioned host in less than five minutes or some "action buttons" actually doing nothing as before.

Please, have a look to this thread: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/ESXi-Discussions/After-upgrade-the-esxi-from-6-7-to-esxi-7-0-u2a-I...

Regards,
Ferdinando

[vjagdale]

Thank you for sharing this. My coworker Miroslava S will get back to you on this one. 

[Kinnison]

@vjagdale, You are welcome,

If we want to seriously discuss it, that's not the only problem, there are several other shortcomings that make the use of graphical user interfaces typical of the "ESXi host" / "vCenter" objects uncomfortable or even useless.

The monitoring of "electricity consumption" in the context of the vCenter 7.x object indicates values ​​so devoid of any logic as to be completely useless, it was discussed in this forum some time ago and since then "nothing" has been changed. But then in the announcement of vSphere 8 emphasis is given to the chapter "Green Metrics".

Forget the controversy, but certain things could be corrected very easily if someone made the commitment to try them firsthand.
See, install the latest version of the ESXi 8.0 product and see that if we exclude "a little more color and some icons" the rest of the user interface mantain all its flaws personally I find it unpleasant. There is indeed something new, the ability to define "custom theme settings", I hope not saved in some "cookies" otherwise "good night to the dreamers" if you delete them.

If you wish we can continue to discuss about that trhead, but with other tools, otherwise it would end up in a "sort of chat".

Regards,
Ferdinando

[msotirova]

Thank you for the feedback! It is very important for us since we are trying to improve your experience with our products!

Additional questions: Would you share with us in which specific use cases you need to switch between vSphere Client and open ESXi client? What are the capabilities and operations in terms of host management and configurations that vSphere does not have compared to the ESXi client?

[DCasota]

Hi,

Sharing some thoughts.

is there a plan for a sort of vcsa role promotion / demotion ? Cross cloud services customers as the new normal should not need to provision a vcsa in the future. E.g. in cloud console: tenant account > register server > select from eligible servers for vcsa > demote, promote or provision.

For edge servers with inferencing differentiation (glasses, cars, inferencing mirrors in stores) it would be helpful to pin the inferencing screen output. This implies feature completeness on ESXi Host Client and DCUI. The local console implementation unfortunately has to be refactorize to a modern software kvm. The Alt-F1 to Alt-F12 is text-based only.

Shrink the payload . Do not loose usage .

[Kinnison]

@msotirova, good morning,

Thank you for your interest, but I fear that in part the point is missing, you know about limitations and defects of both products because some have been present for a long time (measurable in months or years) others are instead introduced between an update and the other.

Coming to your other question, in my opinion the only correct answer is that it depends on the circumstances we face,

if I have to perform an update of the vCSA object the only way to perform a "cold snapshot" is to use the "host client interface", but also to start it or the services it depends on (for example DNS services, LDAP service etc.) in the case of certain scheduled maintenance interventions or after some failure.

But then if you want to monitor the events related to an ESXi host it is better to use the vCenter object because the implementation present in the "host client interface" object is almost unusable.

But I also have a question, what is the technical reason behind the deployment of a VCSA object that still foresees "hardware compatibility 10", "LSI Logic parallel" controller and thus as selected OS guest "Other 3.x Linux"?

Regards,
Ferdinando