Connect with me - vSphere Tutorial

- [Rick] In this video I'll break down the different clients that are available with vSphere 6.7, and I'll talk a little bit about the future and what you can expect to happen as new releases come out in regards to all of these clients. So first off, we've got our trusty vSphere Web Client. This has been the standard client for quite a while now, and it is a Flash-based client. So basically, with the vSphere Web Client you launch a web browser. You connect to your vCenter server. You have to have Flash installed on your PC. And you can use the Web Client to manage whatever you need to manage. You connect to directly to vCenter. You cannot connect to an ESXi host using the vSphere Web Client. So what I mean by that is vCenter is our central management server. That's what we connect to with the vSphere Web Client. And through vCenter we can manage all of our ESXi hosts, but we can't connect directly to an ESXi host with a vSphere Web Client. So we have a different client for that that we'll get to in just a couple slides here. And we'll explain how to connect to those individual standalone ESXi hosts, but the Web Client itself is strictly for connecting to a vCenter server. And VMware has announced that the vSphere Web Client is deprecated. So does that mean to us? Well basically, it means that the vSphere Web Client is still supported with vSphere 6.7, but that in the future VMware plans to make the vSphere Web Client unavailable. So it's going away, but as of the moment it's still currently supported. And here you can see some of the details. This was released on VMware's blog website in 2017, that the vSphere Web Client was going away. That VMware plans to deprecate the Flash-based vSphere Web Client with their next numbered release, and that release is 6.7. So you're going to start moving over to a different client now. There's a new client called the vSphere Client, and the vSphere Client does not rely on Flash. It is an HTML5 web browser based client. And this is the client that you're going to see in the vast majority of demos in this course. I try to use the vSphere Client for most of the demos. I'm still going to use the old vSphere Web Client for some demos here and there. All the demos do take place in a 6.7 environment, but I'll primarily be sticking to the HTML5 client as I work through most of the demos of this course. And again, just like the vSPhere Web Client we use the vSphere Client to connect to vCenter. Now this might be a little confusing, especially if you've worked with VMware for a long time. You may remember the vSphere Client that we used to have. It used to be a program that you installed on your computer and some people call it the C# Client, some people call it the vSphere Client. It was very well like client that we had for years and years and years. This is not that. This is a brand new HTML5 browser based client. I launch an HTML5 web browser. I connect to vCenter, and I can manage everything right through my web browser. And again, just like the vSphere Client I can't connect to individual standalone ESXi hosts. I can only use the vSphere Client to connect to my vCenter server, where I can centrally manage all my ESXi hosts, all my virtual machines, all my data stores, all my virtual switches, and everything else that I need to manage in my vSphere environment. And the vSphere Client supports a full feature set as of vSphere 6.7 Update 1, and that's why I'll be using it to demonstrate the vast majority of tasks in our demos because now there's full feature set support for the vSphere Client in Update 1 of vSphere 6.7. Now the other client that we still need to be aware of is the VMware Host Client. This is another HTML5 browser based client, but what we're going to do with the Host Client is connect to those standalone ESXi hosts. So let's say you only have one or two hosts and you have not deployed vCenter. You can use the Host Client to manage those two hosts. Let's say that you have a single host environment and you don't have vCenter. You can use the Host Client to manage that host. Let's say you're turning up a brand new data center and you've just installed your first host and you want to put vCenter on that. Well you can use the Host Client to do the initial configuration of that ESXi host. So the Host Client is still important and still definitely required. If you ever need to manage a standalone ESXi host you can use the Host Client and configure that ESXi host without having a vCenter server present.