vSphere Client Usability Improvements in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

The Client is Evolving

vSphere Client is the most popular interface for infrastructure management provided by Broadcom. It is the main control plane for the customer environments. The Client accumulates more than 220 millions of clicks per month over more than 10 million user sessions by hundreds of thousands unique users. We can hardly overestimate the importance of the vSphere UI for VMware Cloud Foundation customers.

We understand the role vSphere Client plays in the daily operations of the infrastructure admins. This is the reason we continue to invest in improving the usability of the UI. Our goal is to simplify the infrastructure management and speed up operations.

We would like to highlight some of the usability enhancements we have recently introduced. Most importantly, they are all available in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. We want to make sure the infrastructure admins are well aware of the capabilities the Client provides.

Visibility Enhancements

Starting with two simple, but cool features the admins can easily access in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. Right on top of the Inventory tree in the Client you can find the cogwheel icon providing some useful capabilities.

• The admin can hide or show the VMs in the hosts and clusters list. Hiding the VMs from the hosts inventory makes it less crowded and easier to operate. This is an option that existed before, but many users were unaware of. Consequently, we’re giving it more visibility.
• The admin can turn on or off the text wrapping in the columns of the object grids. Turning off the text wrapping reduces the height of each entry in the grid to a single row. As a result, the admin can observe more entries per page. At the same time, if they want to see the full details for a certain entry, for example the full name of a task, they can simply turn the text wrapping on.

vSphere Client Object Grids

In vSphere 8.0 we added the advanced filtering options to the inventory objects grids. It is easy to switch between the Quick filter and Advanced filter through as a drop-down on all object grids: Hosts, VMs, Datastores, etc. To make even better use of the feature, and knowing the importance of the VM grid, we added more parameters to filter the VMs by, such as MAC address and number of snapshots.

The Advanced Filter allows the admin to apply multiple criteria to the same parameter, for example VM active memory to be greater than 10MB and less than 100 MB. They can combine multiple filters together, e.g. number of snapshots, VM state, used space. The admin can apply filters by any column of the grid, disregarding if it is currently visible or not. We also made the Advanced Filter available in the Global Inventory Lists (Main navigation menu → Global Inventory Lists → Virtual Machines) for all the global grids – VMs, Hosts, Datacenters etc.

We are also glad to point that in a future release we are bringing back the virtual scrolling to the data grids. Our goal is to keep continuously enhancing the capabilities to operate with large object sets in the UI.

Tasks and Events in vSphere Client

We improved the scaling of the tasks and events consoles by accommodating up to 300 rows per page. In addition, we are now loading all the tasks and events from the vCenter Database in the UI. From exporting perspective, all the tasks or events on a certain page can be exported in a single batch. To facilitate the tasks and events monitoring, we also provide the option to open each of the consoles in a separate tab within the same user session.

In the future, we will increase the export set to a maximum of 30K objects. Additionally, we will elevate the number of entities shown per page to 900.

VM Snapshots in vSphere Client

To further facilitate the VM mgmt. in vSphere UI, we added the option to automatically delete all unnecessary VM snapshots through a specific scheduled task. To do so, the admin will select the VMs which snapshots need processing, and will use the following option from the VM context menu: Snapshots → Schedule Snapshot Deletion. In the dedicated wizard, they will set up the frequency of the deletion. It could be a one time operation, or could be repeated monthly, weekly, daily or hourly. Alternatively, the operation could be run on each vCenter startup. For example, the admin can choose to schedule the old snapshot deletion to be run weekly on Sunday in a specific hour, and to configure the period in which the scheduled task will be active. Ultimately, the admin can specify minimal number of days needed to pass from snapshot creation, before it can be deleted.

You can leverage the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Hands-On Labs to get first-hand experience of the usability improvements in vSphere Client. We continue our efforts to modernise and enhance the UI. There are many features in the pipeline for the upcoming releases. Be it an occasional vSphere Client user, or an every-day practitioner, follow this space!