ESXi Simple Web (aka less ghetto webAccess)

Do you remember webAccess for those of you who were fortunate enough to have worked with classic ESX? I do and I personally have found that feature in the past to be very useful especially when you need to perform a quick VM power operation and you just have access to a web browser. Recently, one of my readers, Wei Kin Huang left a comment on my blog about a very cool solution that he built called ESXi Simple Web which is based off of some earlier work I did with a VMware Fling called Ops Panel for ESX for which I created a Ghetto webAccess for ESXi.

In his own words, ESXi Simple Web provides the following:

Basic controls straight from the esxi host in the browser

This allows you to run basic operations against the ESXi MOB api from a simple web interface straight from the ESXi host without the need for the vCenter web client.

Inspired by virtuallyGhetto's Ghetto webAccess for ESXi

Wei's ESXi Simple Web definitely looks prettier and from what I can tell, it looks to be using Bootstrap, a popular web front-end framework for the UI. The web interface talks to the vSphere MOB which basically communicates to the vSphere API for providing the summary details and basic VM operations.

You can try out ESXi Simple Web by downloading the latest version over on his Github repo. Once downloaded, you just need to extract the content and SCP the "web" directory over to the ESXi host under /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot

Here are a couple more screenshots of ESXi Simple Web running on my Apple Mac Mini with ESXi 5.5:

There is a Virtual Machines tab that you can drill down and get some information about your VMs and perform basic power on/off operations.

You can also drill down into an individual VM and get a nice thumbnail of the VM console as well as additional configurations for that VM.

If you are interested in adding additional functionality, you can contribute by sending a pull requests to esxi-simple-web Github project.