The clever bods at VMware labs have just released another new Fling… and this one’s a damn awesome Fling!
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxi-embedded-host-client
What it allows you to do (after installing the VIB) is to open up a browser to your ESXi host and gain access to a simple client allowing you to manage your freshly installed ESXi host (for example if you haven’t yet deployed vCenter Server or don’t have access to the C# client). The look and feel of it is very similar to the current Web client…. very simple to navigate and access the features/functions.

The client is still in the development phase, and as such does not open up all the features possible, the VMware engineers have only implemented a hand full of the most important features:
- VM operations (Power on, off, reset, suspend, etc).
- Creating a new VM, from scratch or from OVF/OVA (limited OVA support)
- Configuring NTP on a host
- Displaying summaries, events, tasks and notifications/alerts
- Providing a console to VMs
- Configuring host networking
- Configuring host advanced settings
- Configuring host services
Only issue is it’s a VIB which means you need to copy it across to your ESXi host (using a SCP tool like WinSCP).
Then once copied over you need to install the VIB into the kernel (esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/esxui.vib)
Hopefully the next version will be a fully packaged installer that asks for the IP address of your ESXi host and goes off and deploys the VIB automatically!
The best thing about it – it’s HTML5 and JavaScript….. no Flash!!!! =)
Go off, have a try and then offer your feedback or post up any issues you encounter! Hopefully it’ll get rolled into vSphere ESXi in the future! =)