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Has anyone succeeded in connecting to a vcenter 5.5 appliance with a RHEL6 workstation? If so, what's the magic incantation and ritual keystrokes?

Made the mistake of upgrading to esxi 5.5 without fully researching the fallout. My bad. I know better, but anyway....

Turns out it doesn't like vcenter 5.1; it wants vcenter 5.5. Vcenter 5.5 requires flash, and not only that requires a version of flash that Redhat does not support (the appliance wants flash 11.5 or greater. Redhat only deploys 11.2).

Vmware's apparent workaround is to 1. Use windows on the desktop. or 2. Install google chrome. (which, btw, google chrome no longer supports RHEL6, although there are workarounds)

Catch 22. Gotta love it.

Completely ignoring the phenomenal BS I'm going to have to jump through to get chrome ok'ed for the tech set, when I did the workarounds and installed it anyway, connecting to vserver:9443 gives an error that says "couldn't load shockwave flash", along with a little puzzle piece in the middle of the windows that says 'couldn't load plugin'. chrome:plugins says 'Adobe Flash Player' 'always allowed' box is checked (I checked it.)

Any suggestions? Or just restore the esxi 5.1 system from backup and stay there?

Thanks!

ewwhite
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user52874
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3 Answers3

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I had a team member try this today with a newly-built vSphere 5.5 installation. He had to obtain the current mainstream Google Chrome, as it's the officially-supported browser for vSphere's Web Client. Following that, he was able to connect to the client successfully.

Personally, I use a Mac and also have access to local and remote Windows VMs. It's the cost of doing business.

ewwhite
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2

Ok, here's what I did. It does work for the limited testing I did.

http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk

Thanks to Mr. Lloyd for stepping up to the plate and resolving this issue.

However, I've decided to forego vcenter and stick with what works, which is two separate boxes with esxi 5.5 on them. Two reasons. 1. Not important enough to go through the tech set approval gauntlet. 2. Flash has no place in a serious or production environment and is just asking for trouble.

user52874
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  • +1 - Good that this is resolved. But isn't avoiding the required components of the vSphere suite showing inflexibility on your side? – ewwhite Feb 26 '14 at 22:21
  • @ewwhite When the requirements are patently absurd, such as this is... – Michael Hampton Feb 26 '14 at 22:25
  • @MichaelHampton The requirements suck, but they're changing. I've just become used to having the right tools to work around these things. – ewwhite Feb 26 '14 at 22:38
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I use it regularly myself and would suggest chromium (open source chrome) and pepper flash.

Ubuntu instructions are: Install the PPA from here: https://launchpad.net/~skunk/+archive/pepper-flash and use Chromium. A quick summary of the steps are:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer

.. it then installs..

echo ". /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh" | sudo tee -a /etc/chromium-browser/default

When you restart chromium, you should be using the new flash plugin!

Unfortunately I have not tested with redhat.

Rqomey
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