VMware vSphere Client

What works

I'm adding in all of the previous  testing notes from Thomas Hood and making slight modifications from my experience

Everything except as mentioned below.

Thanks to Je Moi for making this discovery!

What does not

For every guest the Console tab shows a black screen which seems not to grab the focus.

Clicking on Inventory | Virtual Machine | Open Console or Launch virtual machine console icon brings up a dialog with title "Error" and message "Exception of type 'System.Windows.Forms.AxHost+InvalidActiveXStateException' was thrown."

Workarounds

What was not tested

Only basic vSphere Client functionality has been tested so far.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I set this to Bronze because the console won't work which is a big part of this program After installing wine 1.7.5 I had to set the wineprefix for my installation of the dotnet programs to work. Even-though I was already in a 32bit environment and a clean installation, the prefex had to be set. previous installation notes below === $ sudo apt-get install winbind=2:3.6.6-3ubuntu4 libwbclient0=2:3.6.6-3ubuntu4 samba-common=2:3.6.6-3ubuntu4 # See note #1. $ WINEARCH=win32 winecfg # See note #2. $ winetricks dotnet20 # See note #3 $ winetricks dotnet20 $ winetricks dotnet20sp1 $ winetricks dotnet30 # See note #4. $ winetricks dotnet30 $ winetricks dotnet30sp1 # See notes #5 and #6. $ winetricks ie6 # See note #7. $ winetricks ie6 $ winetricks winxp # See note #7. $ wine VMware-viclient-all-4.1.0-258902v4.1.exe $ wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/VMware/Infrastructure/Virtual\ Infrastructure\ Client/Launcher/VpxClient.exe Notes #1: At the time I tried to install these I already had version 2:3.6.6-3ubuntu5 of samba-common but only version 2:3.6.6-3ubuntu4 of these packages was available in the repo. #2: Other contributors didn't mention this but this step was necessary in my case to cause Wine to assume a 32-bit environment rather than a 64-bit environment on my amd64 host machine. #3: This instructs one to download dotnetfx.exe and place it a certain directory; do this. #4: This instructs one to download netframework3.exe and place it a certain directory; do this. Be patient. On one occasion I had to repeat this step several times before it succeeded. #5: Other contributors did not mention that this was needed. However, on an earlier installation attempt where I did not install dotnet30sp1 and I then tried to install vSphere Client, the latter seemed to enter a loop trying to download .NET 3.0SP1 and failing. After installing dotnet30sp1 the installation of vSphere Client succeeded. Possibly a coincidence. But installing dotnet30sp1 shouldn't do any harm. #6: If "winetricks dotnet35" and "winetricks dotnet35sp1" are done here then vSphere Client can still be installed but the program fails to start. So don't do dotnet35 and dotnet35sp1. #7: It's necessary

VMware has released version 4.1 Update 1 which has not yet been tested. VMware has released version 5.0 but I was unable to get it installed on an amd64 Ubuntu natty system.