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Replying to:
hostasaurus
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Just joining the chorus here; I think the client is absolutely horrible as well.

More specific complaints, besides just the horribly bloated and slow performance.

  1. For those of us with EMC equipment, and EMC PowerPath for VMware, there are productivity-increasing plugins for the C# client that are not available for the web client, and there are configuration and information screens provided via plugins that are not available for the client.  So those of us with such a setup actually have to use both clients to fully manage the environment which is incredibly stupid.  Okay I need to do this, let's see, which of the two clients permits me to do that, hmm, try, fail, try the other one, success.  Next task, repeat.  One would have hoped that with EMC owning VMware, they wouldn't screw up EMC's own VMware-specific products, but I guess that was wishful thinking.
  2. No usable update manager, so no way to install PowerPath or other host-based plugins that install via update baselines.
  3. No usable update manager, so no way to actually upgrade hosts.
  4. We had a no flash on management systems policy for security reasons and had to reverse that just for this stupid client, since we had upgraded all the machine versions to 10.
  5. Many times, alerts that would cause a yellow or red flag on hosts or guests will not dynamically appear in the web client, or will not dynamically disappear if the issue has cleared; you have to refresh.  Of course, you don't want to refresh, since the damn interface is so slow, so data you're seeing may be out of date.
  6. Web client, hmm, can I use it from a mobile device over VPN?  ROFL, good luck trying that; it might load in 60 minutes.
  7. Need to see what LUNs a given host has defined, or looking to make sure a specific LUN is connected?  C# client: Host -> Configuration -> Storage -> Datastores and you get a nice presentable list with the display name of the datastores in question.  Web client: Host -> Manage -> Storage -> Storage Devices.  Oh, I'm connected to disk naa.6006016010602a0054d4043c34b5e211; great, that's really f'ing useful, I memorized all the device ID's of every LUN on all my arrays.  Well let me copy it out and see if I can search for it elsewhere; oh, can't f'ing copy from the web client, let me type it all out by hand then, I love doing that.  Can I at least make sure all the paths to the device are up?  Nope, web client doesn't know anything about PowerPath, so somehow it's connected but has zero paths.  Guess I get to jump back over to the C# client to see what it says.  For those of you who are looking for a solution to this, go to Home -> Storage -> the array that you want, click it, click Related Objects, click Hosts.  It will at least tell you if the storage you want is connected to the host you want.
  8. Kickstarting a guest and need its MAC address?  Okay, guest, summary, drop down the NIC, there it is.  Let me copy that out so I can paste it into my installer machine; oh, once again, can't f'ing copy text from the web client.  How backwards is that, you can copy useful things from a Windows program but not from a web page.  Guess I'll type it out by hand once again.
  9. Last but certainly not least; many of the screens contain data that is too wide to display on even a reasonably sized monitor, so you have to scroll left or right.  I don't like collapsing the alerts and tasks lists because I like to see what is going on.  Can I move them to the bottom where they were on the C# client?  Nope, they will be on your right and you're going to like it.