With the release of vSphere 5.1 comes a new primary administration tool for managing your VMware vSphere 5.x environments, the vSphere Web Client. While the new web client has been given feature parity with that of previous vSphere Desktop Clients; the new features released with vSphere 5.1 and higher are only managed via the vSphere Web Client.
To help understand the functionality of each client, below lists the new features that are only available via the web client and several features that remain available only in the desktop client. If a feature is not listed then that functionality is available in both the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Desktop Client.
vSphere Web Client Only
vSphere Desktop Client Only
vCenter Single Sign-On
Authentication
Administration
Navigation with Inventory Lists
Inventory Tagging
Work In Progress (Pause)
Pre-emptive Searching
Save Searches
Enhanced read performance utilizing the Inventory Service
vSphere Replication (not SRM)
Virtual Infrastructure Navigator
Enhanced vMotion (no shared storage)
Integration with vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Workflows (Extended Menus)
Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS)
Health Check
Export/Restore Configuration
Diagram filtering
Log Browser Plugin
vSphere Data Protection (VDP)
VXLAN Networking
Ability to change Guest OS on an existing virtual machine
Inflate thin disk option found in the Datastore Browser
