WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Minimum amount of memory to run the vCenter Server Appliance

by // 18 Comments

I thought this might have been common knowledge, but after chatting with a VMware colleague who recently rebuilt his home lab, I realized it may not be the case. The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is distributed as a virtual appliance and by default it is configured for 8GB of memory. However, this is definitely NOT the "minimum" amount of memory required to have a fully functional vCenter Server.

It looks like some people are just downloading the vCenter Server appliance and just sticking with the defaults of 8GB of memory which for a home lab is quite a large footprint, especially given you will probably want to install other virtual machines. The actual minimum for vCenter Server (Windows or Linux) is just 4GB and technically speaking, you can even get away with just 3GB for the vCenter Server Appliance (anything less, the system is extremely slow and unusable).

Here is a quick screenshot showing vCenter Server Appliance running with only 3GB of memory:

VMware also has a KB article detailing the minimum requirements for the vCenter Server Appliance based on the number of virtual machines and hosts you plan on running. For my home lab, I normally stick with the 4GB of memory and I have not had any issues. Hopefully this tip will help you save some memory for either your lab or even production environment for other workloads.

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client

by // 7 Comments

After publishing an article about the vSphere Web Client Recent History Feature, I received question from a reader asking about the keyboard shortcuts that were available as part of the legacy vSphere C# Client. The reader really enjoyed these shortcuts as a way to quickly navigate between the various inventories and was wondering if similar keyboard shortcuts existed for the new vSphere Web Client? I was not able to find anything in our documentation and decided to reach out to our UE (User Experience) folks to see if they could assist.

Though we do not have every single keyboard shortcut that was available from the legacy vSphere C# Client, we actually do have quite a few and this somehow must have gotten missed during documentation (I have filed documentation bug on this). In talking to our UE folks, some of the challenges in adding the keyboard shortcuts was to find shortcuts that have not already been taken by either a web browser (vSphere Web Client is a browser application) or the Operating System used to connect to the vSphere Web Client. It was also very important if new shortcuts were added, that it would be easy to understand. As you can see this was not a trivial task at all.

The screenshot below provides a quick overview of the available keyboard shortcuts for the vSphere Web Client. Take a look at the table below for a more detailed break down of each keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Combination Action
Ctrl+Alt+s
 Quick Search
Ctrl+Alt+Home OR Ctrl+Alt+1
 Home Screen
Ctrl+Alt+2
 Virtual Infrastructure Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+3
 Hosts and Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+4
 VMs and Templates Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+5
 Datastores and Datastore Clusters Inventory
Ctrl+Alt+6
 Networking Inventory

I was able to verify these shortcuts on both a Mac OS X system as well as a on Windows. This is something I definitely will be bookmark as a useful reference. If there are other keyboard shortcuts that you have grown to rely on in the legacy vSphere C# Client and would like to see in the new vSphere Web Client, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it gets to our UE folks.

Which Vendor Has A vSphere Web Client Plugin?

by // 25 Comments

It's no secret that going forward, VMware's new vSphere Web Client will be the primary graphical interface for interacting with vSphere and other solutions within the vCloud Suite. This is regardless of whether the interface is using FLEX, HTML5 or some other framework, that is not the the topic of discussion, so please do not ask 🙂

VMware has also made this very clear in the recent vSphere 5.1 release notes:

In vSphere 5.1, all new vSphere features are available only through the vSphere Web Client. The traditional vSphere Client will continue to operate, supporting the same feature set as vSphere 5.0, but not exposing any of the new features in vSphere 5.1.

vSphere 5.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include the traditional vSphere Client. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the vSphere Web Client.

The vSphere Web Client was first introduced with the release of vSphere 5.0 with limited virtual machine and host capabilities. In vSphere 5.1, it was completely revamped to bring the large majority of functionality that we have all been used to in the vSphere C# Client and VMware will continue to close this gap and bring other improvements with future releases of vSphere.

As with any major change, this will not happen overnight and will take time for VMware, customers and partners to transition over. Just take a look at the transition from classic ESX to ESXi, it took several years for that to really sink in through the various updates and it is no longer a question or concern anymore.

A common request that I have heard from customers regarding the new vSphere Web Client is the availability of 3rd party vendor plugins. I have found it quite difficult to find all the plugins that are available and I bet customers would love to see a consolidated list in one place that they can search through. Well, I decided to do some research as well as leverage my Twitter followers to help me build out the complete list of vSphere Web Client plugins. I have broken the list by VMware, Partners, Scripted (legacy) and Unreleased vSphere Web Client plugins. I have also tried to include links to each of the 3rd party plugins so you can easily get more information about each of them.

If you are a customer and you do not see a specific vendor plugin, I highly recommend you reach out to your vendor and provide them feedback, this includes VMware. The more feedback our partners receive, the better chance you will get a vSphere Web Client plugin or any other feature for that matter!

If there are other vSphere Web Client plugins that you know of, please leave a comment or reply back on twitter with #webclientplugin and I will update the blog post.

VMware vSphere Web Client Plugins

3rd Party Vendor vSphere Web Client Plugins

Scripted vSphere Web Client Plugins (not "native" plugins but legacy C# Scripted method)

Unreleased vSphere Web Client Plugins

Community vSphere Web Client Plugins

If you are interested in learning more about the new vSphere Web Client including videos and demos or looking to develop your own vSphere Web Client, please take a look at the additional resources below.