VMware vSphere Client

What works

Creating, editing, start, stoping, restarting VMs.

What does not

Unable to start console session on VM.

Workarounds

Installation is problematic, a hcmon error causes installer/updater to fail and roll back all changes i.e. delete the entire Vsphere client.

Run the installer upto and including recieving the hcmon error. OK that error message, but do not Finish the installation.

Copy the Vsphere WINPREFIX elsewhere. Click Finish on the installer.

Delete the Vsphere WINEPREFIX and then restore your copy to it's original location. For example, create the WINEPREFIX ~/.vsphere, install application, click OK on hcmon error (do not press finish on the installer), copy .vsphere to .vspherecopy. Click Finish on the installer. Delete .vsphere. Rename or copy .vspherecopy to .vsphere.

Further components required:

winetricks -q dotnet35sp1 msxml3 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010

What was not tested

Anything console dependent.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Works reasonably well, however the real value of this application is being able to start a "console" session on the VM, by create a remote connection to the ESX server. Not having the console functionality really truncated the usefulness of running this in Wine.

Used winehq-staging 3.9

AMD FX-8350 Black Edition
16GB RAM
Sabertooth 990FX R1
Nvidia Geforce 1050 Ti

Kernel: 4.9.87-antix.1-amd64-smp GNU/Linux

Nvidia 396.24 drivers
DE: Xfce 4.12.2

Create a fresh 32-bit WINEPREFIX

  WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.vsphere" WINEARCH=win32 wine wineboot

# Install .NET 3.5 sp1 and several other components with winetricks:

   winetricks -q dotnet35sp1 msxml3 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010

Install the vSphere Windows installer exe.

  wine ~/Downloads/VMware-viclient-all-${version}.exe

  WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.vsphere" wine ~/.vsphere/drive_c/Program Files/VMware/Infrastructure/Virtual Infrastructure Client/Launcher/VpxClient.exe

The HCMON drvier error is now be fixed so the following steps are now deprecated:

Step through the installation dialogs accepting all defaults. When you see an error about installing the hcmon driver, STOP do not click OK.

Copy your ~/.vsphere directory to another location. e.g.:

  cp -R ~/.vsphere ~/Desktop/.vsphere

When the folder is copied you can now proceed:

Click OK to the hcmon driver error dialog, and click
Finish on the installer dialog. It will say that the installation
failed and will rollback the installation leaving the vsphere
installation folder empty.

Now copy the folder back:

  cp -R ~/Desktop/.vsphere ~/.vsphere