My wishlist for the vSphere Web Client .Next

First off I want to state that by no means do I have anything to do with VMware and/or the development of any of the following.  Also, VMware has nothing to do with me and to my knowledge are not working on any of the following items, but you never know 🙂

So with that out of the way lets get started.  I’ve had enough time to use the web client provided with vSphere 5.1 to know that it is most certainly a powerful tool.  As of late I’ve been experimenting with adding my own vCenter Orchestrator workflows and executing these from the Web Client – This is, along with some other features of the web client that I have blogged about (tagging and searching),  very cool and very nice to have.  That being said, I’m a geek, and I’m never satisfied, always wanting more – so here’s what I call a wishlist for the WebClient.Next.

vCOps / Capacity IQ overprosioned VMs identification.

Although in many environments almost every single VM may be over provisioned I think it would still be nice to be able to quickly identify those that are heavily over provisioned (maybe by a metric? that the user defines).  So maybe the elephant is a bit much, but to have the VM icon change, or an alarm raised directly within the web client may help to drive home the importance of right sizing your VMs.  It may expose this information to more people, more application owners that may have access to vCenter but not vCOPs.  But hey, why stop there?  Why not make some recommendations when editing the said VMs settings on where that “right-size” is.  Maybe another little row on the RAM selection to identify vCOps recommendations, or maybe a simple note in the CPU selection window.

More vCOps integration

I’m not going to lie, it has been fabulous being able to view those vCOps badges from within the web client.  The less I need to go to another tab the better 🙂  That being said I want more!!!  It would be nice to have some of the vCOps reports available from within the web client and mapped to inventory items contextually….  Just as we can now start a vCenter Orchestrator workflow by right-clicking on a cluster it would be nice to generate a capacity report in a similar fashion.

More vendor plugins

Obviously this one isn’t on VMware, I believe that the foundation is already there, but I’d love to see more and more vendors and partners take advantage of it and develop plugins for the web client.  For instance, those backup vendors that have had integration within the c# client, as well as those that haven’t had any integration at all.  I can certainly see advantages to right clicking a VM and being able to directly add it to a backup job.  I understand that vDP already has this, but there are a lot of people using third party solutions….

***UPDATE***

The longer I wait to publish this the more of my items are being delivered.  Veeam has just announced their support and integration into the vSphere Web Client in the next release of Backup and Replication.

Update Manager and Single Host Management

Yup, this is one that I’m positive is on the list for almost everyone I know.  We certainly need a way to perform those Update Manager scans and remediations from within the Web Client.  Having to switch back and forth between clients, well, how do I put it, kinda sucks!  Also the ability to manage a single host.  I’m sure we are not the only customer in the world that has those one-off hosts that are not connected to a vCenter – it would certainly be nice to be able to have the same interface available to manage these as well.  This one I would assume is a shoe in as there will be no more C# client next release.

Tags into PowerCLI

OK OK, this one really has nothing to do with the web client but still, something I wanted to stress.  The ability to assign tags to inventory items in vSphere 5.1 is one of the most useful and practical features of the release in my opinion.  It’s easier to sort through massive amounts of VMs, tag them by service, location, sla, however you really want.  Certainly granting the ability to tag and retrieve VMs by tag from PowerCLI can only complement that feature as there are a lot of scripts I find myself wanting to write, but being held back by the absence of and tag cmdlets.

Speaking of Tags and Update Manager

Wouldn’t it be nice to remediate hosts based on how they have been tagged?  Hmm, OK, well, maybe that isn’t that useful…BUT, what would be cool is having the ability to schedule certain VMware Tools/Compatibility updates based on  a virtual machine tag.  I’ve had countless times where I’ve needed to move certain VMs into a temporary folder in order to have them participate in a VMware tools upgrade that following night, then, move them back and try to remember where they were. By simply tagging these VMs and running my scheduled tasks against the tags would make this process a little easier.

I’m sure I had more, however over the weeks I’ve been compiling this list I’ve just forgotten to write some of them down…  With that said, is there anything you are looking for in vSphere.Next?  Comments, concerns, opinions, rants, all are welcome below….