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VMware VSX - One plugin download site to rule them all?

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VMware PEX (Partner Exchange) took place this week in San Francisco and as you would expect there were many announcements both from VMware as well as from our partners regarding new updates and products. After reading Duncan's latest Startup News Flash I found out that PernixData has just released a new vSphere Web Client plugin and thought I would update my popular article Which Vendor Has A vSphere Web Client Plugin? After sharing the update on Twitter, I received several more updates from couple other vendors which I have also updated.

In talking to Jason Boche and others, it was noted that it was pretty difficult to not only find a complete list of vSphere Web Client Plugins (which is why I created the original article) but also complete list of vC Ops Management Packs and vCO Plugins. I was thinking about creating additional articles to capture these plugin downloads and then realized VMware already provides this through VMware Solution Exchange website also known as VSX which was recently revamped in the last couple of months.

It took me a minutes to find the location of the VMware plugins, but it is listed under Cloud Management Marketplace. Under this section, you will have the ability to filter by the specific VMware product you are interested in for add-ons as well as the content type (e.g. workflow vs documentation).

Here is a quick link to the add-on download page for the following VMware products:

I think it would be really useful to also include a section for vSphere Web Client plugins, but for now you can take a look at the complete list here. I will provide my feedback again to the folks running VSX and hopefully we some luck we will get a section for the vSphere Web Client plugins.

vSphere Web Client Plugin for Custom Attributes

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I just learned about a very cool vSphere Web Client Plugin that was developed by a fellow vExpert, Patrick Haefner who shared this during the South Germany VMUG back in February of last year. The custom vSphere Web Client Plugin allows administrators to view Custom Attributes in the vSphere Web Client which is currently not available today. The Custom Attributes vSphere Web Client is hosted on the VMUG site and you will need to register to access the download page found here.

Disclaimer: This plugin is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk.

To install the Custom Attributes plugin, you just need to extract the contents of the zip file and you will should see a directory called haif-customfields-ui. You will need to copy this directory to your vCenter Server which is running the vSphere Web Client. This plugin should work on both vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.

For Windows vCenter Server:

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service

For VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)

  1. Stop the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client stop
  2. Copy haif-customfields-ui to /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/plugin-packages
  3. Start the vSphere Web Client service by running /etc/init.d/vsphere-client start

Once the vSphere Web Client has been started, you can now login and for Virtual Machines or ESXi hosts which have Custom Attributes, you should now see a new portlet displaying the Custom Attributes as seen in the screenshot below.

I think this is a really cool plugin and shows how extensible the vSphere Web Client is by leveraging the vSphere Web Client SDK. With a bit of imagination, you can pretty much build anything! Though today Patrick's plugin only allows you to view the Custom Attributes, perhaps if there is enough requests, he may add the ability to modify Custom Attributes. Awesome work Patrick and thanks for sharing it with the community!

Big thanks to Ruediger M. who works as a VMware SE in Germany for sharing this awesome information. This is definitely a plugin I will be installing in my environments šŸ™‚

Which Vendor Has A vSphere Web Client Plugin?

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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 šŸ™‚

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.