Disclaimer: Many of the screen grabs in these “What’s New” series came from the beta program, not from the recent GA. In effort to get this info out to you quickly I’ve retained them. However, the final GA UI’s might differ slightly… I hope to update the graphics (where neccessary) as I roll-out the GA version of the products in the coming weeks…
Before I begin with this post I want to point out an important new “feature” of vSphere5.5 in the web-client. It’s much faster. That’s it really. To be honest I think many in the user community found the first version of the web-client too slow especially when opening up menus. The “gears” icons would spin round for sometime, and some times the transitions between the menus took time to refresh.
The vSphere5.5 web client is so much quicker the only way I could capture the graphic above was with a screen recorder called “Screenflow” on the mac. I played the video back frame-by-frame until I got the gears icons, and then I captured the recording with cmd+shift+4 on the mac. So… If you were previously put off by the vSphere Web-Client before because of poor performance, and felt you had to restort back to the C# vSphere Client – then I entirely understand because I did EXACTLY the same thing. But I think it might be time to look at it again. Just sayin’.
The initial setup and configuration of the vCNS or vShield Manager if you like is much the same as it was when I first played with it in anger under 5.1. For a more step-by-step coverage of this – that includes setting a static IP address – and registering the Manager with vCenter and for the “Lookup Service” check out this post in my archive:
The big difference is some (not all) of the controls over the Manager can be done from the all-new vSphere Web-Client. So there are UI extensions that a link to “Network & Security”.
When you click at this “Network & Security” icon – you get to see the core “Network Virtualization” features of vCNS including – Edge Gateway, Network Pools and Logical Networks
To be honest I tend to keep my admin tasks with vCNS within the scope of vCloud Director. I rarely touch this or the core vCNS Manager UI – nor do I use the CLI to the vCNS either.