With the recent announcement of VMware vSphere 6, I can finally start talking about the improvements we’ve made for vSphere 6 Web Client. Over 100 enhancements, with some user actions performing 5x faster. There are excel sheets and graphs full of performance data, but the best way to see the difference is to experience it yourself. If you’ve been wary of using vSphere Web Client in the past, you should give it another shot with vSphere 6.
In my time here I’ve heard of many tips on using Web Client that I didn’t learn during training or while using it directly. I thought it would be helpful to put all of these learnings in one place. I’m sure many of you reading this know about some of these tips, but hopefully there are some new ones in there that are helpful to you as well. This is a living document, so if there are tips and tricks not on the list, please share with the rest of us by adding it to the list. I should stress that this is not an official VMware document:
There are also many enhancements in the vSphere 6 Web Client, some of which are highlighted below:
Controlling “All Users’ Tasks” for performance
We know that the All Users’ Tasks view of Recent Tasks is an important feature, but it also turns out to be an incredibly “heavy” feature, which can quickly spiral out of control and impact vCenter Server performance. The focus of this version of vSphere Web Client was improving performance and giving you more control on customizing your experience. In order to achieve both of these goals, we had to make it a bit harder to get to All Users’ Tasks. This will help ensure that your systems will run smoother out of the box, with the option to enable the feature if you need it. We are also actively working on a better solution for this feature, but couldn’t get it in time for this release.
You’ll see some instructions when you first select All Users’ Tasks, and more detailed steps are in the Release Notes, but I included them here for reference. Once you’ve enabled this feature, it becomes the default view:
A) Click More Tasks in the Recent Tasks panel to view all users’ tasks.
OR
B) Edit the webclient.properties file and change the “show.allusers.tasks” setting. For large vSphere environments, changing the “show.allusers.tasks” setting can potentially impact performance.
1. Locate the webclient.properties file
For the vCenter Server Appliance, the file is located in the /etc/vmware/vsphere-client/webclient.properties directory.
For vCenter Server on Windows, the file is located in the C:ProgramDataVMwarevCenterServercfgvsphere-clientwebclient.properties directory.
2. Edit the file using a text editor and change show.allusers.tasks=false to show.allusers.tasks=true.
3. That’s it! No restart of anything should be required. Go to vSphere Web Client, select “All Users’ Tasks” and it should work.
Many performance enhancements
Performance was the primary goal of this release of vSphere Web Client. Efforts were made to improve the performance of every portion of the interface, and you should see these improvements when you start using vSphere 6. Here are some of the major areas we worked on: Login and Home page, Summary pages, Networking pages, Related Objects lists, General Navigation, Performance Charts, Action Menus (right click), and reducing unnecessary data retrieval, which also serves to lighten load on vCenter Server.
The net result is that the vSphere 6 Web Client is an entirely new experience and easier to use than previous versions of vSphere Web Client.
Tasks where they belong
This was shown at VMworld, but is worth another mention: The tasks pane is now back at the bottom, giving you room to see the information you need.
This comes along with the ability to move and resize panes (we call this Dockable UI), allowing you to customize it to your liking, such as below where Alarms and Work in Progress have been moved to provide a larger workspace.
Reorganized Action menus (right click)
Action menus have been reorganized and flattened so that your actions are easier to find, and placed more familiarly. It should be much easier to pick up as you transition from the old desktop client to vSphere Web Client.
Home menu navigation
The new and improved home button now shows a navigation menu which allows you to jump from wherever you are to one of the common views. You can now get back to any of the major inventory trees from anywhere in one click!
I hope this overview encourages you to upgrade your existing vCenter Servers to vSphere 6 so that you can experience these improvements (and more!) that we’ve made.
