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Quick Tip - Useful Flash Player optimization for the vSphere Web Client & other Flash WebApps

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I recently picked up a useful tidbit from engineering on a Flash Player optimization setting that can be helpful when using the vSphere Web Client or any other Flash web application for that matter. The particular setting is the Website Storage Settings which controls the amount of temporary data that can be stored by the Flash Player on your local disk and by default this is limited to 100Kb. This limited storage footprint is actually done on purposes as a security feature of Flash.

However, at some point the Flash Player will reach this limit and prompt the user to allow additional disk space to be consumed and this is where you may see the vSphere Web Client crash and you would to go through the motions of logging back in.

To avoid this scenario, you can change the default 100Kb to unlimited for a particular site which I was recommended so that I would not hit this problem. I do want to stress that this is not a VMware best practice but more of a general Flash Player best practice but I think it is something to be aware of and could help from a usability perspective.

To check your current settings, Adobe has made it very simple by just navigating to the following URL: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

A panel will load and you will get access to a variety of Flash Player settings including the Website Storage Settings which is what the link above will default to.

You will now be able to browser to the particular website, in our case we will be looking for either the hostname or IP Address of your vSphere Web Client Server and you will be able to see its current usage as well as limit. To change the default, you just need to click on the website and then move the toggle at the top to the far right which will show up as "unlimited". I would recommend you make this change for all your vSphere Web Client servers that you access. It would have been nice to see our vSphere Web Client automatically detect this and recommend the change or automatically default to this setting.

Would you like MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server) support for the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)?

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Many of you know that I am a huge fan of the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance), especially when it comes to a new deployment and how easy it is compared to the Windows version. I especially like how upgrades work for the VCSA by deploying a new VCSA and then performing a migration based upgrade to the new appliance. This provides a nice roll-back mechanism in case something happens and all I need to do is just power on the original VCSA to get the original environment up and running again.

Having said all this, I know the VCSA is still currently lacking a few features which may prevent customers from fully adopting the solution for their production workload. However, if you take a look a how far the VCSA has come from its initial release in vSphere 5.0 release, it has greatly improved and we continue to enhance it with every release. With release of vSphere 5.5, we now support the following configurations maximums:

ESXi Hosts Virtual Machines
Embedded vPostgres DB 100 3,000
External Oracle DB 1000 10,000

Even before vSphere 5.5 release, VMware has internally pushed the boundaries of the VCSA (vSphere 5.1) and the embedded vPostgres database by running one of the most dynamic and demanding workload in a very short amount of time which is the VMworld's Hands On Lab. This really goes to show the type of scale and performance the VCSA and the embedded vPostgres database can support.

One of the most frequent piece of feedback that I have heard from customers regarding the VCSA is to provide support for Microsoft SQL Server database. This request is quite understandable, especially for a Windows shop where you may already have a team of Database Administrators who are quite familiar with the operational and management aspects of maintaining a MSSQL database.

VMware is actually not opposed to supporting MSSQL for the VCSA which runs on SuSE Linux but the challenge in the past was the lack of a Microsoft ODBC driver for SLES. Well it turns out last year Mircosoft released a Community Tech Preview Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server on SLES, however the driver is currently only a Tech Preview and to do justice for VMware customers, we would want to use a GA (General Available) driver which means that there would be full support from Microsoft.

If you would like the VCSA to have MSSQL support, you can help by providing this feedback to your local Microsoft representative or filing a feature request. The more customer demand we have for this, the more likelihood MSSQL DB support can become a reality.

In addition to providing feedback to Microsoft, I think it would also be useful to let our PMs know how important MSSQL DB support & the VCSA is to you which will also help with the prioritization of features. If you can help fill out this quick survey below, that would also be great.

HTML5 VM Console does not work after rebooting the VCSA or Windows vCenter Server 5.5

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There was an issue that was identified by some folks internally as well as myself around the new HTML5 VM Console for the VCSA 5.5 (vCenter Server Appliance). The issue is that after a reboot of the VCSA, the new HTML5 VM Console no longer functions. When you launch the console from the vSphere Web Client, you will get the following error "could not connect to x.x.x.x:7331"

After troubleshooting the issue with some of the engineers, it turns out there is an environmental variable that is not being properly set. There is a simple workaround to restore HTML5 VM Console functionality, take a look at the steps below:

Step 1 - Open up /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/server/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf (for Windows it is under C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\server\bin\service\conf\wrapper.conf) and add set.default.VMWARE_JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jre-vmware under the environmental section and save the file.

Step 2 - Restart the vSphere Web Client by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/vsphere-client restart

Once the vSphere Web Client is available, you will now be able to access the HTML5 VM Console when launching from a Mac OS X system or an automatic generated URL. This issue has already been reported internally and we will also get a VMware KB article published with the workaround.

Here is the official VMware KB 2060604