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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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kgottleib
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Arrogance is a form of ignorance. 


Sadly, the web client has effected my job satisfaction.  I was once nothing but an MCSE, and grew to hate the hours and hours of late night windows support recovering windows into the early morning hours, waiting too long for reboots etc etc...


my first vmware implementation was in 2004, and from there I made it my career focus and never looked back, almost doubling my income in a few short years, with great joy in managing a new and exciting technology that made things easier and more efficient. 


IN one swoop  of the web client vmware  management has robbed me of this, and many others.  They don't understand the magnitude this horrible piece of sh...t is having on the 'hands on' aspect of managing the technology.  It is atrocious and outright insulting. 


VMware - you can no longer claim your product introduces efficiency in the form of op ex.  take down and or edit every web page and marketing publication that states your product makes thing easier and more efficient, it is simply no longer the case.  You have sabotaged yourself and are sabotaging the future of your growth Through poor decision making and arrogance. 


the entire IT world is laughing at you right now while you arrogantly sit back and dilute yourselves with thoughts of LEADING the world into a new era.  Smart people aren't lead with arrogance and poor decision making, and especially not by the release of poorly design product.   You are stumbling big time, the writing is on the wall. 


Fix the fiasco, the for good of all. 


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vThinkBeyondVM
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I agree with you. I heard web client is going to be improved lot in 2015/16 release.


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Vikas, VCP70, MCTS on AD, SCJP6.0, VCF, vSphere with Tanzu specialist.
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Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. I am solely responsible for all content published here. Content published here is not read, reviewed or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily represent or reflect the views or opinions of VMware.

Rubeck
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I would like to disagree, but I can't.... :smileymischief:

/Rubeck

Faize
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VMware's trying to force people to use something that clearly doesn't meet their needs - just like what Microsoft tried with Windows 8.

I can only hope the web client fails just as miserably as Windows 8 did.

thebigO
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Without a doubt best Post title of the week as far as I am concerned.

Any post with a title like this is worth a read.

I hate to say but I agree.  The web management is rubbish compared to the VIC.

kgottleib
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At first I felt bad about the post because it was nothing but a ranting VENT, which I felt I needed after working in the web client all afternoon.  The response is so so slow, it is a wonder I got any work done.

Anyhow, I appreciate your support of this post!, because I'm hoping it can become a catalyst for proper change.  Performance is productivity, and it also makes for a much more enjoyable user experience when the systems you touch are instantly responsive to your actions. 

Also, aside from performance, there is way too much useless, cluttered information scattered about this web interface.   

sound
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Hi kgottleib,

We are working very hard on improving the performance of the Web Client--believe me, we realize this is a pain point. At the risk of asking a somewhat incendiary question, may I have ask for some more details about what sorts of things you don't like? Is it all based on performance, or are there other aspects of usability that you specifically don't like? Thanks very much for your time and patience.

JarryG
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Yeah, THAT is the problem: you are trying to improve it. But the truth is web-client is such a crap you'd better throw it away and create something new, from the scratch. And even pick different name, because you made "web-client" synonym for software-hell...

It's 2014 and you still force corporate clients to use flash? Seems to me someone got terribly overdosed there, really...

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! 😉
kgottleib
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Well, having been working with VMware since 2003, I can tell you that over the years I've seen the C# client grow and grow, till it became a headache to install it on a new system that you would use to connect to vCenter or an ESXi host directly.

However, although this seemed to be a problem, it still allows for LESS data to be sent from the vCenter DB down to the client for the simple matter that you have a large amount of the visible data residing locally, and this is fast, response times are great.

With the web client, it would appear as though everything you see in the browser, from page to page, is being transferred down the same as any web content, and the more data that needs to be transferred the longer we wait.  the refresh times to access data are way way to slow.  If you are a high speed internal network it isnt' as bad, but try supporting VMware remotely using this client, the experience gets  worse and worse.  and to think that some are considering ways to allow engineers to manage using an android or iphone app or tablet???  please, not enough memory in these devices for this to work to the satisfaction of any experienced user.  VMware  infrastructure contains too much data, and the more VMs and hosts deployed the data set only gets  larger... and slows things down even more.  

Do a test, launch both local C# client and the web client at the same time and make note of what's faster and better.   the performance difference is so much better with the c# that there is no comparison.

The web client seems  to be overloaded with useless details about things.  Also, the way some things have been moved around it makes it difficult to figure out where they are, and once you find where to make the configuration change you want to make, it only makes you wonder why it you need to navigate around so much to get there.

As far as websites go, from both a design and functional level, and this is what this new client is, nothing more than an interactive website, the look and feel is horrible.  The VMware website doesn't look like this, so why hasn't some of the design expertise flowed into the creation of this web interface?

a link is typically a way to know there is an option for configuration or actions, but some of the actionable items don't appear  as links and can get tricky finding them, although most are obvious.  so there is a strange combination of both links, icons, and even text that you can  click on without  a  link displayed that will allow you to do stuff, and this can be confusing.  I almost feel lost  at times trying to gather the info I need and log back into the C# to get quick access  to it.    I remember the first time I wanted to provision a new datastore it was a nightmare finding there configuration area to add storage after it was so easy to find in the C# client.  Host \ mange \ storage \ Related Objects????? \ datastores   

JarryG points out the flash issue, so I need not repeat it, it isn't a great decision.  I move around a lot and often find myself of new workstations often, and often times I try to connect using the web client I get flash messages about it not being supported on the local machine when it tries to install, but then turn around and install it manually without any problems????   I am logging into VMware to troubleshoot an issue, I don't want to have to first troubleshoot the local machine I'm on just to get connected.

I think JarryG has it right, you should be looking to get rid of it.  

thebigO
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Vmware stop doing what you are doing. Stop trying to sell this polished turd to us.  Stop Stop Stop.  OK now focus and listen.

Web client is crap so just scrap it and start again with something that looks like the VIC.  Don't try and let Digital teams and Marketing teams tell you it needs to be funky and look cool and to do this you need to change all the menus and make normal tasks in the VIC now be in nested menus and hard to find. No apologies to the team sipping on Red Bulls, wearing base ball caps backwards and thinking they are awesome developers. Bow Bow.  Get on with it and give us robust platforms with solid Admin tools.

Just make it lightweight and simple or go back to the VIC because we don't pay over priced licensing and support costs for this rubbish.

MKguy
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Unfortunately I have to agree with most of the negative sentiments expressed here. I do like that you can pause current actions with the work in progress feature, something which you can't do with the C# client though, but that's about it.

The worst thing IMO is the mandatory dependency on proprietary flash to even open the site. The 5.5 Web Client already provides a HTML5-based VM remote console, so I don't see why VMware shouldn't take this further and replace flash entirely.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
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kwolton10
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I completely agree, it's not even a 'web client' as you need to load a plugin to be able to use it! Vmware have let their customers down with this one, big time!

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wmarusiak
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Unfortunately sometimes I am forced to perform some tasks in C# client because it is much faster than through web client. I forced myself to learn and use web client knowing that C# one will disappear. Sometimes you just can't stand how slow things are in web client. I am using fast lan connection, I use Chrome and flash cache optimization but still - sloooow.

Best Regards, Wojciech https://wojcieh.net
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cmoser546
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totaly agree with you guys, this thing is a nightmare.

I spend a lot of my time managing dozens of VMware Infrastructures. vSphere Client was something like my home Smiley Happy

The worst thing is this aweful response times - you re waiting seconds for each click - and you need a lot more clicks for almost every action compared to C# Client. the only browser you can use the web client is chrome, every other browser is either much slower or crashes after a few hours.

the other worse thing is overview. in the C# Client you have this wonderful tree on the left side, which allows you to go instantly to the item you like to manage. in webclient, you are constantly navigate forward an backward, loosing focus on what task you are (its like hitting windows key on windows 8). sure, there is something like a tree, but i can't figure out the logic behind this thing, it just shows...something - or if you have lots of objects it shows...nothing.

it appears as the gui designer was a robot, the structure  represents the object tree as it appears in the API. But keep in mind that Humans operate on this thing, not robots!

And then there are some really bad bugs, e.g. deploying ova. just doesn't work, lots of "datastore-xyz not found"-errors. (while native client works well)

and besides, i think you vmware guys know that webclient is garbage. So please, at least enable Native Client to Manage Hardware Version 10 machines.

Kagome
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I would like a coexistence of both.

For 'productive'-work the Desktop Client is the best choose, because it is fast and you have a lot of nice overviews.

But i'f i'm out in one of our branch office it is nice to use the webclient for a short look at a certain vm - or if you want to restart the vm ...

I like the feater of the context menue to add orchestrator Workflows, but that is still buggy 😕

Basicly it would be nice to import the new vSphere 5.5 features to the Desktop Client, maybe add the functionality of  contextmenue for the orchestrator in the desktop Client.

But stop forcing people to use only the webclient.

admin
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Hi All,

We appreciate all the feedback you are giving on the product. We acknowledge some of the serious issues reported.

Currently, we are indeed addressing performance related issues as one of the top priority items. Some of the performance improvement areas we are looking at are:

- Action menus

- Related object lists

- Performance charts

- Auto refresh when a logged in user does a change on a given UI item. This will eliminate the need for clicking refresh button

- Few other optimizations been done across client product

We hope to have a much improved client at GA

On the flash issue: Yes, web client today is flash based and we acknowledge the vulnerability issue. We are very focused on building a html5 based client right now. We will make announcements when it is ready. Clearly its not going to be in this upcoming major release

Please continue to provide feedback, we value your comments. We will continue to provide frequent updates on performance improvements done.

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kwolton10
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If you want to make your customers happy, bring back the client. I do agree there is a place for the web client for quick admin tasks and diagnostics when you cannot get to the client but for everything else, i would prefer the client. Please bring it back!!!

Even the Vmware support guys hate it and have hinted the the people they talk to for support also hate it.

Please bring back the proper client and stop trying to force us to use the inadequate and cumbersome web client. If you are going to bring out a proper web client then make it built into the appliance and easy to configure, without any SSO agents or rubbish to install.

amurrey
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I can't help but agree with this post.

If we are doing away with the VIC, the web client must have at least the SAME or BETTER functionality as the VIC.  That's what we expect from a company like VMWare.  The current web client is just garbage.

Flash?  Yes, that horse is dead.  Please, please, please, HTML5 the next go round.  Don't put yet another web based tool out there that requires some off version of Java that is going to break tomorrow when the next two releases of the JVM come out.

Let's face it.  The VIC isn't always the most reliable tool.  There is room for improvement, and room for a web base vCenter management UI to really shine.  I hope that with whatever product that is released in 2014+, the web client in its current form is scraped, and replaced!

TBKing
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I tried to use the web client a few times, then I had to get some work done, rather than searching, clicking  and waiting...

Also I understand the SRM plug in and a few others are not compatible with the web client as well.

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admin
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SRM plugin for web client is coming later this year

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