I have to jump in here, as both a VAR selling servers on which vSphere is frequently deployed, and as a casual user of ESXi for my own internal projects and development.
I frankly like neither the web client nor the legacy desktop client, for different reasons. The web client is very slow, confusing due to the poor organisation of its menus and dialogs, and the console plugin simply does not work well over VNC/RDP/Citrix.
The desktop client is also slower than it should be (speaking as a rusty developer), has absolutely horrendous error reporting, lacks lots of what I consider essential functionality, for example patching hosts and various batch operations. On the upside, it works well for the most common tasks of starting/stopping and deploying VMs, and basic configuration tasks. It is good enough for perhaps 80% of my daily tasks, with the rest currently handled via clumsy CLI/scripts.
Here's what I would expect from the ideal client:
- it MUST be my go-to for all management and maintenance tasks
- it MUST give the option to remember my login credentials, because my workstation is already secured via other means
- it MUST let me patch hosts without needing some convoluted toolchain like VUM or the command line
- it MUST let me configure every aspect of individual hosts and clusters via context menus and wizards
- it MUST give meaningful error messages when something does not work as intended, and the means to fix such problems (e.g. killing a hung VM process)
- it should let me save multiple sets of IP / credentials, because I often work with multiple, separate sites
Most importantly: it should be pleasant to use, because the last thing I need during an outage or system failure, is frustrating software that slows me down by being unreasonably sluggish. The server is *one* hop away from my workstation, on a gigabit or better pipe. Why should I wait several seconds to populate a list of VMs or check a performance graph ?
I see this being most readily achieved with a desktop client. The web interface can come later, or better yet: publish good API documentation and let the community produce a web interface. Just look at the variety of clients out there for Xen and KVM... those technologies aren't as mature as ESXi, but the tools are light-years ahead and scripting is a breeze. Why don't we paying customers have tools at least as good as the free stuff ?
