Vsphere 6.5 Windows Client

/ Comments off

Today lets talk about vSphere client. VSphere client is a management tool for VMware administrators to manage ESXi hosts or vCentre servers. VSphere client normally install on a windows machine and directly access to the vCentre e server or a ESXi host to manage all the virtual infrastructure. VSphere client give you a simplified understanding of your virtual infrastructure and manage all those graphically. Vsphere client 6.5 download for free. System Utilities downloads - VMware vSphere Client by VMware, Inc. And many more programs are available for instant and free download. VMware vSphere, during its history and the different versions, has got several types of GUI clients. One of the most used (not the first, but the standard one since Virtual Infrastructure 3.0) was the vSphere Client for Windows. But on May 2016 VMware has announced that the Legacy C# Client (aka thick client, desktop client, or vSphere Client. If you are using the legacy VMware vSphere Client on Windows 10 you may have some issues with the VM console that display only a part of the screen and leave blank other parts. You can use other clients (like the Web Client if you have vCenter or the Host UI if you have at least ESXi 6.0U2), but. VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Setup issues on Windows 8 If you’re unable to install older versions of the vSphere Client on Windows 8 or 8.1, I suggest you to take a look to this post who handles a common compatibility issue. Download latest vSphere client installer directly from VMWare Published by Tyler Woods on April 17, 2017 April 17, 2017 Ever since vSphere 6.5 I’ve bee missing some parts of the vSphere client.

- [Rick] In this video, I'll break down the different clients that are available with vSphere 6.7, and I'll talk a little bit about the future and what you can expect to happen as new releases come out in regards to all of these clients. So first off, we've got our trusty vSphere Web Client. This has been the standard client for quite a while now, and it is a flash-based client. So basically, with the vSphere Web Client, you launch a web browser, you connect to your vCenter server, you have to have flash installed on your PC, and you can use the web client to manage whatever you need to manage. You connect to directly to vCenter, you cannot connect to an ESXi host using the vSphere Web Client. So what I mean by that is vCenter is our central management server. That's what we connect to with the vSphere Web Client, and through vCenter we can manage all of our ESXi hosts. But we can can't connect directly to an ESXi host with the vSphere Web Client. So, we have a different client for that that we'll get to in just a couple slides here. And we'll explain how to connect to those individual standalone ESXi hosts. But the web client itself is strictly for connecting to a vCenter server. And VMware has announced that the vSphere Web Client is deprecated. So what does that mean to us? Well, basically, it means that the vSphere Web Client is still supported with vSphere 6.7. But, that in the future, VMware plans to make the vSphere Web Client unavailable. So it's going away. But as of the moment, it's still currently supported. And here you can see some of the details. This was released on VMware's blog website in 2017. That the vSphere Web Client was going away. That VMware plans to deprecate the flash-based vSphere Web Client with their next numbered release. And that release is 6.7. So you're going to start moving over to a different client now. There's a new client called the vSphere Client. And the vSphere Client does not rely on flash. It is an HTML5 web browser-based client. And this is the client that you're going to see in the vast majority of demos in this course. I try to use the vSphere Client for most of the demos. I'm still going to use the old vSphere Web Client for some demos here and there. All the demos do take place in a 6.7 environment, but I'll primarily be sticking to the HTML5 client as I work through most of the demos of this course. And again, just like the vSphere Web Client, we use the vSphere Client to connect to vCenter. Now this might be a little confusing, especially if you've worked with VMware for a long time. You may remember the vSphere Client that we used to have. It used to be a program that you installed on your computer. And some people call it the C# client, some people call it the vSphere Client. It was a very well liked client that we had for years and years and years. This is not that. This is a brand new HTML5 browser-based client. I launch an HTML5 web browser, I connect to vCenter, and I can manage everything right through my web browser. And again, just like the vSphere Client, I can't connect to individual standalone ESXi hosts. I can only use the vSphere Client to connect to my vCenter server, or I can centrally manage all my ESXi hosts on my virtual machines, on my data stores, on my virtual switches, and everything else that I need to manage in my vSphere environment. And the vSphere Client supports a full feature set, as a vSphere 6.7 update one. And that's why I'll be using it to demonstrate the vast majority of tasks in our demos, because now there's a full feature set support for the vSphere Client in update one of vSphere 6.7. Now the other client that we still need to be aware of is the VMware host client. This is another HTML5 browser-based client. But what we're going to do with the host client is connect to those standalone ESXi hosts. So let's say you only have one or two hosts and you have not deployed vCenter. You can use the host client to manage those two hosts. Let's say that you have a single host environment, and you don't have vCenter. We can use the host client to manage that host. Let's say you're turning up a brand new data center, and you've just installed your first host and you want to put vCenter on that. Well, you can use the host client to do the initial configuration of that ESXi host. So the host client is still important and still definitely required. If you ever need to manage a standalone ESXi host, you can use the host client and configure that ESXi host without having a vCenter server present.

Despite VMware’s stride to push for the adoption of vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) instead of its Windows-based twin, the latter is still an integral part of vSphere 6.5. In this short how-to post, I’ll guide you through the steps required to install the latest incarnation of vCenter. To keep matters simple, I went for an embedded Platform Services Controller and PostgreSQL database solution. This setup will suffice for most SMBs out there. Broadly speaking, most SMB VMware based environment will fall under the Tiny or Small categories as per VMware’s literature.

The table shows the different types of environments, their respective capacity in terms of the number of ESXi hosts and deployed VMs and the compute resources that need to be allocated to vCenter Server.

TypeESXi HostsVMsVC RAM (GB)VC CPUs
Tiny10100102
Small1001000164
Medium4004000248
Large1000100003216
X-Large200035,00004824

Note: vCenter Server for Windows 6.5 runs on Windows Server 2008 SP2 or better. As per earlier versions, installing vCenter on an Active Directory Domain Controller IS NOT supported.

A complete list of requirements is available on the VMware vSphere 6.5 documentation site.

Download Altaro VM Backup

Start your free 30-day trial of Altaro VM Backup today and see why it's trusted by 40 000+ organizations worldwide. Get started now and run your first backup in under 15 mins!

Getting on with the installation

Step 1: Prepare a VM or physical server. The specifications should reflect the environment you expect to be managing. Remember to allocate at least 10GB of RAM, 2 CPUs and 17GB of disk space over and above what’s required for the Windows OS and other installed software. Also keep in mind that in time, the vCenter database will grow in size, so factor in this as well when allocating disk capacity.

Step 2: Decide on a hostname for vCenter (ex. vcw65). Create the corresponding A and PTR records on a DNS server and make sure that the records resolve correctly.

Vsphere 6.5 Windows Client

Figure 1 – Creating the DNS records for the vCenter Server for Windows instance

Step 3: Install Windows Server as you would normally do. After the install, apply all pending updates and patches.

Step 4: Make sure the Windows computer name matches the vCenter hostname i.e. vcw65. Reboot the server.

Figure 2 – Setting the vCenter Server Windows computer name

Step 5:Download the latest vCenter Server 6.5 ISO from my.vmware.com.

Step 6: When deploying vCenter to a VM, you can mount the ISO image as a DVD drive directly from a datastore or from local disk. If a physical machine is used instead, you can copy the ISO image to a folder on the Windows server and then mount it as a drive from the OS itself; right-click on the file and mount!

Figure 3 – Mount the ISO image on a VM from a local disk

Step 7: Login as administrator on the Windows box.

Step 8: Double-click on the DVD drive just mounted. This launches the VMware vCenter Installer.

Ssh Windows Client

Figure 4 – The mounted ISO image in Windows Explorer

Step 9: From here on, the installer takes you through a series of screens and options, most of which are self-explanatory. Regardless, I listed the whole lot in a sequential order each accompanied by a brief note as follows.

Hatch

  • Click on Install to start the installation wizard.
  • Click Next to proceed.
  • Tick the EULA agreement box at the bottom and press Next.
  • Select Embedded Deployment on the PSC options screen. Press Next.
  • Type in the fully qualified name (FQDN) for the vCenter Server. This must match the DNS A record created. Press Next.
  • Type in a password for the administrator@vsphere.local account. Leave everything else as set. Press Next.
  • Since we’re using the embedded database, the Windows Local System account will do just fine. Press Next.
  • Select the embedded database option and press Next.
  • Leave the default port selection as is and press Next.
  • Note: If you’re planning on or have already installed additional software that performs network port binding, make sure that there are no port conflicts. As a rule of thumb, you should avoid installing anything else unless absolutely necessary.
  • Specify the installation folder for vCenter. You can either stick to the default settings or specify your own. Press Next.
  • Note: For live servers, I personally prefer a dedicated disk for the installation, more so if I’m virtualizing the vCenter server.
  • Here you can opt to join CEIP. Press Next.
  • And finally, press Install to launch the installation process.
  • Installation progress … it may take a while so grab a cup of coffee!
  • Once the installation is done, you are presented with this screen.

The process is 100% identical to installing vCenter Server 6.0 for Windows as described in my somewhat old post How to set up a nested vSphere 6 nested environment. So really, very little has changed from an installation perspective. Under the hood, however, there have been some changes as explained here.

Conclusion

Installing vCenter Server 6.5 for Windows is pretty straightforward provided you prepare the groundwork first. Compared to earlier versions, very little has changed except that vCenter is now a little bit more resource hungry. The thick (C#) vSphere client is, officially, no longer supported. This means that getting used to the vSphere Web client (or HTML5 client) is no longer optional.

I would also have loved to see the Web client laid to rest once and for all but since its new HTML5 alternative is still not up to par, I guess we will all have to wait until vSphere 7 is released!

Vmware 6.5 Vsphere Client

UPDATE: vSphere 6.5 U1 has recently been released. It brings the HMTL5 client almost up to par with the vSphere Web client in terms of functionality. Read about it here.