Today a post was made by Dennis Lu on the blows.vmware.com site regarding the retirement of the vSphere C# client that we’ve all come to love over the years. I am still trying to convert friends and colleagues over to the web client but have not been too successful. This is mainly because for most instances we’re still using vSphere 5.5 which, honestly, does suffer a bit in regard to performance/reliability (the web client portion itself).
I personally find that vSphere 6 has a very usable web client, but I do admit that I often manually refresh the view and reload the page, etc. I have had the opportunity to test drive some examples of the new HTML5 client, including the VMware Fling versions, and have to say that it should be great once finally polished. The UI has a different look than the current web client and as of my last testing was still implemented by deploying a “web client appliance”. I think it’s safe to assume that vSphere 6.1 and 6.5 will ship with the HTML5 web client as part of the vCenter deployment, but that has yet to be hashed out.
I know we’ve all heard that the C# client would be phased out – in fact, it was one of the most interesting points of the vSphere 6 release for me. I was bummed to find out not that the C# client was still included in vSphere 6, but that the web client had not been hugely refined from vSphere 5.5. I do find the vSphere 6 web client more useful and reliable than the vSphere 5.5 variation, but it is still not perfect.
With that said, Dennis has made it very clear that the C# client should not be expected going forward and that the HTML5 client will be here to stay. I do hope that VMware sticks to this. Although many of my friends and colleagues rely on the C# client, it’s clear that many storage, network, and other infrastructure manufacturers are developing plugins that only work with the current web client. And, if we’re expected to use the web client for such plugins, well, then it might as well be really good!
You can try the new HTML5 Web Client by deploying it from the following Fling link. As always, this is not designed for production and is still in a very pre-production phase. Try it and out give the developers feedback that you might want to see make it into a future release!
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer by profession and am interested in all aspects of technology. I am most interested in virtualization, storage, and enterprise hardware. I am also interested in leveraging public and private cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and vRealize Automation/vCloud Director. When not working with technology I enjoy building high performance cars and dabbling with photography. Thanks for checking out my blog! 
