The Sysadmins

I was interested to play with the new Web Client and to see how well it works on something like Ubuntu. Being able to manage ESXi/Vcenter from a non-windows machine is a pretty big deal!

So… with an Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop live CD in hand and Vcenter 5 configured I thought I’d have a go.

First off, browse to your Web Client install, by default this is https://ip:9443/vsphere-client/

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The web client requires Adobe flash to operate, go ahead and install it

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This brings us to the login page, you can see in the bottom left that the Client integration plug-in is not currently installed. This provides functionality for the web console. Click the link and download the .bundle which is around 42MB

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To install this head to the terminal and run sudo sh ./VMware-VMRC.i386.bundle and agree to the defaults

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Now head back to the login page and login. From here you can do a large array of tasks, for example; stop and start guests, take snapshots, editing a guest configuration, clone, migrate, view events and view performance graphs to name a few. I’ve linked a site at the bottom of this post which gives you a good walk through of features. To access the console, select the guest you want to view, and select ‘Launch Console’

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Select Launch Console which will open the console in another tab/window

I have some issues with one of my 2008 R2 guests which won’t detect or move the mouse (haven’t resolved this yet), but the others are working well, even in full screen mode.

Other functionality seems great, here’s a good walk through of the interface:

Walk through of new vSphere 5 web client interface – virtualizetips.com