Looking to upgrade from vSphere 6.7? Visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center. Get Your vSphere License Key. Once you have purchased VMware vSphere 7.0, you will receive a licensing confirmation email with your license keys or you can retrieve your license keys from the vSphere License portal. VClient is a native Mac application to manage VMware vSphere and ESX(i) servers It will support vSphere 7.0 and Project Pacific! Get rid of web console, try out native client NOW!
We’re pleased to announce that the vSphere Client is now ‘Fully Featured’ in vSphere 6.7 Update 1. This means that you can manage all aspects of your vSphere environment using the HTML5-based vSphere Client, no need to switch back and forth between the vSphere Client and the vSphere Web Client.
We’ve ported all remaining features into the vSphere Client, including Auto Deploy, Host Profiles, VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM), vCenter High Availability (VCHA), network topology diagrams, overview performance charts, and more. Read about all the features released in this version of the vSphere Client by visiting Functionality Updates for the vSphere Client site.
Feature highlights
As part of our drive towards tailoring the vSphere Client to serve your needs, we’ve improved workflow usability and overall performance. You’ll notice some changes how you work with the vSphere Client compared to earlier clients. Here are some of the areas that have changed significantly.
- vCenter High Availability (VCHA)
- We redesigned VCHA workflows to combine the Basic and Advanced configuration workflows. This streamlines the user experience and eliminates the need for manual intervention of some deployments.
- Search Experience
- We revamped the search experience. In this version of the vSphere Client, you can now search for objects with a string and filter the search results based on Tags/Custom attributes. You can also filter the object lists in the search even further. For instance, you can filter on the power state of the VMs etc., You can save your searches and revisit them later.
- Performance Charts
- You can pop the performance charts into a separate tab and zoom in on a specific time in the chart. We also added overview performance charts for datacenters and clusters.
- Dark Theme
- Dark theme has been one of the most requested features for the vSphere Client so we’re introducing a Dark mode setting. Support for the Dark theme is available for all core vSphere Client functionality and implementation for vSphere Client plugins is in progress.
- Alarm Definitions
- We greatly simplified the way you define new alarms, particularly in how you create rules for trigger conditions.
Let’s highlight a couple of features which are available only in the vSphere Client.
- In-product Feedback Tool
- We wanted to make it very easy for you to give us feedback so we included an In-product feedback tool in the vSphere Client. After you login to the vSphere Client, notice the smile icon on the top right corner. You can click the icon to send feedback as a free-form text. You also have an option to capture a screenshot to include in the feedback, annotate, and obfuscate any private information in the captured screenshot. Optionally, you can include your email address so that we can reach out to you to follow-up on your feedback.
- Dashboard
- The home page of vSphere Client is a dashboard that displays resource utilization information (CPU, Memory and Storage), the number of VMs, hosts, a list of objects with critical alerts, and a list of installed plugins that vCenter finds in the environment.
To get familiar with modified workflows and new features in the vSphere Client, take a look at this series of short videos on YouTube.
vSphere Client Plugins
vSphere Client Plugins are UI components built by VMware and our partners to enable you to manage the additional suite of products that work with vSphere. We provided our plugin partners with SDK tools to migrate their plugins to the vSphere Client in advance of this release and client plugins for the following solutions are now available:
- VMware plugins: VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM), vSAN, NSX, vRealize Operations (vROPs), Site Recovery Manager (SRM), vSphere Replication (VR), vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).
- Partner plugins certified for the vSphere Client: IBM Spectrum Protect, IBM Storage Enhancements, Veeam, StorMagic, INFINIDAT, HPE OneVIew, Fujitsu Software ServerView, Fujitsu ETERNUS, ATTO vconfigutoolui. Please refer to VMware Compatibility Guide for the latest set of certified plugins.
We are actively engaging with the additional partners to migrate the remaining plugins. You could refer vSphere 6.7 Client Plugin Readiness blog post to get tentative schedules of additional partner plugins.
vSphere Client flings
We continue to release vSphere Client flings. We often use flings for early feature validation so some features are first released in a fling and later released as part of a standard vSphere release. vSphere Client code in a fling gets the same quality and performance testing as the code in the official supported vSphere releases. Please continue using flings and giving us feedback on how we can make our new features better for you.
To take advantage of all features in the vSphere Client, upgrade to vSphere 6.7 U1 as soon as you can. Until you’re ready to upgrade, you can continue using the vSphere Client flings for vCenter Server 6.5 and vCenter Server 6.0 to get some of the features that are missing in these versions. Please take a moment to fill out this short 2-minute survey about your experience using the vSphere Client so-far.
I have been using the vSphere Web Client more and more lately and though transitioning away from the familiar legacy vSphere C# Client is not the easiest thing to do or always possible for every single operation, there are definitely some nice benefits when using the vSphere Web Client. With the upcoming vSphere 5.5 release, there is even more cool new features in the vSphere Web Client!
Here are my top 5 favorite enhancements in the new vSphere Web Client 5.5 in no particular order. For a complete list of new features in the vSphere Web Client, I recommend you take a look at the What's New in vSphere 5.5 whitepaper.
Mac OS X Support for vSphere Web Client
Being a web application, the vSphere Web Client has always worked on a Mac OS X system, however you may have noticed a couple of things did not work such as OVA/OVF upload, remote device management such as mounting an ISO/Floppy and the biggest one of all is virtual machine console access! This has been one of the most requested feature that I can think of and I am personally excited to see this finally come to fruition. In addition to to the native VM console support (HTML5/WebSockets), there is also now a vSphere Client Integration package for Mac OS X that provides both OVA/OVF upload and remote device management support. This alone is enough for me to upgrade my vCenter Server to 5.5 to get these new feature!
Recently Visited & Created Objects
The recently visited objects is a pretty handy feature that came in vSphere 5.1 which allows you to see what objects you have been recently working with. However, this feature may not have been very well known due to its tiny icon. I am glad to see this feature get its own icon and is now located at the top of the vSphere Inventory Navigator between the navigator and pin icon. In addition to this change, it also now includes a list of the recently created vSphere objects which can come in handy when you are doing something new for the first time and would like a quick way to view the sequence of objects created.
vSphere Inventory Navigator History + Back/Forward Navigation
I am pretty sure our vSphere UE engineers have a more elegant name for this awesome feature, but you can now view the history as you traverse through the vSphere Inventory Navigator and navigate both backwards as well as forward (which is new in vSphere 5.5). To view your current history, you simply just right click on the navigator bar at the top and you will get a drop down list of your history. You can go move forwards or backwards through your history which is a great if you are still getting familiar with the vSphere Web Client and forgot how you got to a particular object.
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Deploy vCenter Operations from vSphere Web Client
I thought this was a pretty cool enhancement by allowing you to deploy vCenter Operations Management from within the vSphere Web Client. You will notice a new vC Ops icon on the main dashboard and on the Getting Started page, there is a link at the bottom that will allow you to deploy the vC Ops appliance by first logging into your MyVMware account. I wonder if we will are going to start doing this for other VMware solutions and just making it easier to deploy the latest version without having to first download it onto your local system.
Configure Auto-Refresh & Disable Inventory Navigator Animation
A common piece of feedback that I have heard regarding the vSphere Web Client experience is that it does not automatically refresh the screen. This is a change from the vSphere C# Client where it will automatically refresh the inventory, but of course there is some overhead associated with this refresh as it needs to pull the latest data from the vCenter Server. However, with the latest vSphere Web Client 5.5, you can now enable auto-refresh using an advanced configuration (by default it is disabled). Before you enable this, do note that this can alter the performance of your environment and be aware this will prevent the session from automatically logging out if you have configured an idle session timeout.
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UPDATE: (03/11/16)- In vSphere 6.0, the path to webclient.properties has changed to /etc/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties
To enable auto-refresh, you will need to locate the following configuration file /var/lib/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties on the VCSA (there should also be an equivalent on Windows version of vSphere Web Client Server)
By default the auto-refresh is disabled, to enable it, you will need to un-comment the following configuration parameter and set the number of seconds to auto-refresh:
refresh.rate = # of seconds
Another feature that I found interesting that can also be controlled in this configuration file is the sliding animation shown when clicking on the vSphere Inventory Navigator. This I assume is to reduce the amount of resources loading the animation, unless the animation was bothering some folks?
By default this is now disabled in vSphere 5.5 and if you wish to see that animation (default in vSphere 5.1), you can re-enable by un-commenting the following configuration parameter:
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navigator.disableAnimation = true or false
There are few other settings that you can control in the webclient.properties, you can take a look at the file for more details.
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There are definitely a few more new features in the vSphere Web Client 5.5 that I have not mention, but these were my my top five favorite enhancements. One more thing I would like to also mention is that vSphere Web Client in vSphere 5.5 release definitely feels much snappier than previous releases and this has made for a much better user experience in my opinion. When you get your hands on the new vSphere Web Client, what will be your favorite new feature?
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