Earlier this year I wrote about the end of life for our beloved vSphere C# thick client. Now that vSphere 6.5 is here VMware delivered on their promise to eliminate the C# client in vSphere 6.5 in lieu of the new HTML5 client that they have been working on to replace the current flash-based vSphere web client that everybody hates on. The new HTML5 web based client is much faster then the old flash client and is a great improvement but the only problem is that its only half done and has a lot of limitations right now. From the vSphere 6.5 release notes:

As of vSphere 6.5, VMware is discontinuing the installable desktop vSphere Client, one of the clients provided in vSphere 6.0 and earlier. vSphere 6.5 does not support this client and it is not included in the product download. vSphere 6.5 introduces the new HTML5-based vSphere Client, which ships with vCenter Server alongside the vSphere Web Client. Not all functionality in the vSphere Web Client has been implemented for the vSphere Client in the vSphere 6.5 release.

So in vSphere 6.5 you pretty much have two options for managing your vSphere environment: use the older, flash based web client that is fully functional, or use the new HTML5 web client which performs much better but is not full functional so you have to keep switching back to the flash based web client. Not really an ideal situation and hopefully VMware kicks it into high gear with the HTML5 client development so you can use it without limitations.

This link to VMware’s documentation provides a pretty long list of over 200 unsupported functionality actions in the HTML5 client. Note that now that the vSphere C# Client is officially dead they are referring to the HTML5 client as the vSphere Client going forward. The new vSphere Client is built into the vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance, you can get the latest HTML5 client builds at the VMware Fling page as it is also delivered independently of vSphere and works with vSphere 6.0 & 6.5.

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