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vAdmins vJoice! vSphere finally gets a modern web client

vSphere 6.0 Update 2.0 lands, complete with a VAIO (not that VAIO)

VMware's popped out its second update to vSphere 6.0 and addressed a long-time vAdmin gripe by adding a new web interface that doesn't rely on old-school plugins.

The new VMware Host Client is an all HTML-5 affair. The new code is derived from a “Fling” VMware posted a few weeks back (Flings are useful-but-unsupported code that VMware suggests vAdmins might want to play with) and has now made it into ESX.

It's still no masterpiece of usability – as the illustration at top (or here for those reading our mobile site) attests – but is notable for two reasons. One is that VMware has remained loyal to the ancient Netscape derived NPAPI plugin standard. Moving to HTML 5 does away with that. The second is that vAdmins have often bemoaned the state of the web clients available to them. The new enhancements here will therefore be welcome.

The headline feature of the vSphere update is support for 25 G and 50 G ethernet link speeds, handy for obvious reasons.

There's also an upgrade to vSphere's VAIO – that's the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, not a laptop - to better handle all-IPv6 environments.

There's half a dozen security fixes included, none toe-curling, and fixes for the usual range of small problems like “ Hostd randomly stops responding on hosts with 3D acceleration” and “ Unable to perform vMotion with VMs that has two 2TB virtual disks.”

AMD's copped a little kick: its Opteron 12xx, 22xx and 82xx series CPUs are no longer supported because they're not on sale so VMware can't be bothered supporting them any more. Wouldn't happen to old Intel kit, we bet.

Release notes and download links are yours for the browsing, here

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