Adobe’s Flash fade may force vCenter upgrades unless you run dodgy browsers

VMware has pointed out that even if you don’t want to move to a newer version of vCenter, Adobe may have already effectively made the decision for you. The situation is the culmination of VMware’s long effort to develop a vSphere web client that doesn’t rely on Adobe Flash. VMware started its move in 2016 when it announced …

[chivo243]

This is why

there is still a copy of netscape navigator, and Camino browser running on my work Mac. For those pesky appliances that haven't had a decent UI update.

Flash should have died a long time ago, and VMware was way too slow out the gate jumping off Flash.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: This is why

yes they should reverse course and go back to the .NET client. The flash and HTML clients are both incredible downgrades compared to the .NET client. I remember I hated the reliance upon windows when I first starting using ESX 3 many years ago(as a Linux on the desktop person since the 90s). But then I learned things could be worse, in the form of the flash, and even the html clients.

I stayed on 5.5 till a bit past EOL one of the reasons was the .NET client(I know that works in 6.0 as well), so I haven't had the pleasure of using the flash client too much. The html client while mostly better than the flash one(but still missing bits that the flash can do in 6.7 at least), is still terribly slow compared to the thick client. I ran my .NET thick client over a Xenapp connection from a remote facility. It was so fast and easy to use. Even the folks in my team that used Macs could use it easily (my main system is Linux but I do run a windows VM for work stuff). I had a cheap version of Xenapp (Fundamentals) which Citrix stopped supporting a long time ago, worked great, 5 user license I think, totally self contained and simple.

Same can be said for Citrix Netscaler. They swore up and down to me years ago that their new HTML client was going to be much better than the Java one - that I'd love it after an adjustment period. Here we are 5 years later and the situation is the same, want the old client(SO MUCH FASTER). Can't get it so it has driven most of my Netscaler admin stuff to the CLI, because the html interface is so slow. Still have to constantly reference the raw config to figure out the syntax since I don't mess with the Netscaler every day(but still more than everyone else in the org combined). I used to run an older Firefox with Java 1.6 for Netscaler (9.3) for the Java UI again on top of Xenapp back in the day, worked really well. Managing Netscaler on CLI probably takes 2-3x longer for many things than the Java UI did, but is still probably faster than the HTML UI(or at least less frustrating).

At least with Flash on vmware, flash was pretty stable (as in didn't change that much) for a long time I think. HTML technologies are changing quite fast making compatibility a bigger issue. For firefox users the ongoing compatibility issues between Firefox and vCenter update manager is one such example.

Doing stuff in the HTML vCenter is probably on average 35% of the speed of doing things in .NET client the way I had it setup anyway. Better than flash which is probably 25% of the speed of .NET.

[Naselus]

Re: This is why

The HTML 5 client isn't that bad anymore. It is still pretty telling that it's only just reaching parity with where the .NET client already was 5 years ago tho.

[J. Cook]

Your problem....

.... is trusting Citrix to not break functionality within the netscaler between x.y.z releases; We went from 10.x to 10.8 or something a number of years ago, and it utterly trashed the remote access functionality bad enough that we had to rebuild it from scratch.

And for whatever reason, the virtual appliance won't let you do simple things like expand the /var partition to hold more logs, so one has to go through and manually clean out the logs folder on the regular in order to get access to the GUI again...

We went back to F5s and have'nt looked back, except to remember how shitty the netscalers were for anything outside of simple layer 3 load balancing.

[Terje]

Re: This is why

I think it's simply that going web based is just usually a bad thing to do, a native client will almost always be both better and faster, yet retarded analysts seems to think that everyone want to do everything in a fing browser

[phuzz]

Re: This is why

Also handy for old APC devices which force you to choose between plain HTTP and HTTPS but only SSLv2, which won't work on most browsers these days.

[Pirate Dave]

Re: This is why

Not to mention all those craptastic CCTV DVR boxes that came from China and require a somewhat strange version of the H.264 codec, as well as a dodgy ActiveX control, to allow you to see the recorded content.

And some of the older Raritan IP-Reach boxes also only work in the older browsers. And those suckers weren't cheap at the time.