VMware has just announced that the VMware vSphere C# Client will be discontinued in the next vSphere release leaving the current Web Client the only available tool to manage the infrastructure.
It's still unclear when VMware will release the new version of vSphere but this decision leaves a certain perplexity in the community due to current issues with vSphere Web Client.
To manage the vSphere infrastructure administrators are currently using both C# and Web clients where some actions can be done only using a specific UI. For instance, VUM is fully supported using the C# Client only.
The setup of advanced features like VSAN can be done only through the Web Client instead.
The current version of Web Client still has plenty of problems. It is a flash-based client with a limited devices support, it crashes quite often and it is slow compared to C# Client.
For a long time, the community is claiming for a new HTML5 & JavaScript version of the Web Client which is faster and supported by an higher number of devices and browsers.
So far Fling is the only Web Client based on HTML5 & Javascript but is not fully complete and due to its limited capabilities can't be a valid solution to replace the C# Client. In addition it's not robust enough to be installed on production.
Fling is currently offering the following features:
- VM Power Operations (common cases)
- VM Edit Settings (simple CPU, Memory, Disk changes)
- VM Console
- VM and Host Summary pages
- VM Migration (only to a Host)
- Clone to Template/VM
- Create VM on a Host (limited)
- Additional monitoring views (Performance charts, Tasks, Events)
- Global Views (Recent tasks, Alarms--view only)
Fling is compatible with vSphere 6.0 environments and it is deployed as a OVA file with the installation instructions command line-based.
The date or launch timing for the next release of vSphere is not known at this time but we should be prepared to say goodbye to C# Client.
