Mobile and other handheld devices are becoming a part of our life by helping us keep up with every possible thing, may it be our health, our social life, or our work. vSphere Client product team wanted to enable admins to keep an eye on their datacenters using these handheld devices.
We are happy to announce that vSphere Mobile Client fling is released to help you monitor your datacenters and take some quick actions to continue running your workloads without any disruption. This lightweight app is available for download for both Android and iOS devices. This app is built using the same vSphere Client (HTML5) APIs, and is compliant with Clarity theme, thus maintaining the consistent data and experience across different vSphere management platforms. Released as a fling since the start of 2019, this app has all the modern mobile app features like Bio-metric authentication, optimized for the touch interface, and offline notification capabilities (more about this later).
vSphere Mobile Client is built keeping monitoring in mind. You can monitor the resource utilization by VMs, Hosts, Clusters, etc., for the same granular metrics as that of vSphere Client (HTML5). You can also monitor the status of tasks, events, or alarms in your environment. There are only a limited set of operations supported in the app to allow you to mitigate any issues you would notice while you monitor. Ex: a host is running out of resources in a DRS enabled cluster and you want to put a host into maintenance mode so DRS can vMotion your application causing zero downtime or you want to take a snapshot of a VM or power reset a VM for a quick fix or have a quick peek at the VM’s remote console. You cannot perform any advanced operations like configuring a cluster or performing manual vMotions thus reducing the risk of “fat fingering” mistakes.
Another cool feature supported by vSphere Mobile Client is offline monitoring of long-running tasks. Let’s assume you are putting a host into maintenance mode which will trigger a bunch of vMotion operations that could take a lot of time to complete. Wouldn’t it be nice to send a notification to your phone when the task completes, so you can open your laptop only if there are any failures? You could achieve this by configuring a notification appliance that monitors these long-running tasks and sends push notifications to your phone app on task completion.
To use the vSphere Mobile Client app, all you need is a VPN connectivity from your phone app to a vCenter server in your datacenter. If your enterprise uses any form of Mobile Device Management (MDM) software, then you can connect using the built-in VPN in the MDM. Since it’s release in 2019 we have seen a significant increase in adoption and usage of the app across the geography. Some of the future capabilities we are considering bringing in the app are: the ability to manage multiple linked vCenter servers including VMware Cloud on AWS, integration between vSAN monitoring app, customizable notifications, vSphere Skyline health integrations, and browser to mobile handoff capabilities.
Before we want to make vSphere Mobile client app as an officially supported product, we want to get feedback from you. Could you use the app and share the feedback using the in-app feedback capability? Let us know what other features support would make you use this app to monitor your production environment. You can leave general feedback comments in the Fling’s comments section or in the device App stores.
Enjoy the app and let us know what you think about it!
What happened to vSphere Mobile Watchlist?!
There used to be a mobile client to manage vSphere environment called vSphere Mobile Watchlist which was built a long time ago. Since this app was heavyweight, was not built to reuse the vSphere Client APIs, it was very expensive for us to enhance it to give a consistent experience. Rather we rebuilt the brand new lightweight vSphere Mobile client app. vSphere Watchlist is no longer supported/maintained.
