Wine

I finally got the VMware Infrastructure Client running directly on my Ubuntu Linux.  I use the word running, because I’m not prepared to use the word working just yet.  Though the application seems fairly stable and most feature / functionality I’ve tested thus has worked, I’ve already found two bugs, one of which will hang your entire terminal.  And believe me, I’ve only just begun to test, so who knows how many more bugs I’ll find?

But until today, I couldn’t even get the client to launch and I haven’t been able to find anyone else that has been able to do so either.  So I’m going to consider this a minor success and a step in the right direction.  But just to be clear, I would NOT advise you start managing your environment with the VIC on wine just yet!

OK, here’s the proceedure I used get this running.

1. My environment (I haven’t yet tried this proceedure on any other combination of Linux and Wine):
   • ubuntu 8.10 (kernel 2.6.27-11)
   • wine-1.1.14
2. Download and install the latest version of winetricks.
3. Run winetricks and select ONLY the following options:  dotnet20, ie6 and winxp.  Now, for future reference, I believe the bugs I’ve already found can be cured with a few more options.  But, one step at a time.  I also know that a couple options will crash the application.
4. Download and install the VMware Infrastructure Client.  You can get this by going to http://<ip of your vCenter server>.
5. Here’s the critical part, you need to modify your vCenter (or ESX) server to accept both HTTP and HTTPS.  By defult, vCenter and ESX will accept HTTP requests, but they are immediately redirected to HTTPS.  And currently, this will break the VIC on wine.  Do NOT do this on a production vCenter server!! To modify your vCenter server, do the following:
   • On your vCenter server, go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter
   • Copy proxy.xml to proxy.xml.bak
   • Open proxy.xml with a text editor
   • Find the lines with httpsWithRedirect and replace with httpAndHttps
   • Restart the “VMware VirtualCenter Server” Service
6. Back on your linux workstation, go to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/VMware/Infrastructure/Virtual Infrastructure Client/Launcher/
7. Execute wine VpxClient.exe and you should see the following:

   

8. Make sure you put an http:// in front of the IP or DNS name of your vCenter server.  Otherwise, it will try to connect via HTTPS and again, this is currently problematic.
9. That should do it.

OK, here are the bugs that I’ve found so far (other than SSL, which I’ve already mentioned):

• Using the right click menu will freeze your screen about 50% of the time.  When it freezes, you’ll have to connect to another TTY, find the process and kill it.  But the alternative menus seem to work.  For example, if you right click on a host and click “New Virtual Machine … ” your screen will likely freeze.  However, if instead you click the “New Virtual Machine” link on the Summary tab, the New Virtual Machine Wizard will properly launch.
• The New Virtual Machine Wizard will not advance past the Virtual Disk Capacity step.  It produces the error “The disk capacity entered was not a properly formatted number or was out of range …”  It gives this same error no matter what value I enter.  Actually, simply clicking Cancel will produce the error.  Weird.
• The Getting Started tab correctly renders the proper HTML, but the viewing area is about 100 x 100 pixels and not adjustable.  (This is nothing more than an annoyance).
• You can create a folder in a datastore, but you can’t delete one.  Deleting files on a datastore seems to work fine.

Most of the navigation (other than the right click menu I mentioned above), seems to work well.  VMotion worked fine.  Configuring HA and DRS worked fine.  Performance stats rendered fine.  But I’ve got a lot more to test and I’ll update again with my test results as I progress.

Thanks to Dan Kegel (www.kegel.com) and Jeff Warnica (don’t know his website/blog) for your help and pointing me in the right direction!

Here are a few more screenshots of the client in action.  Click on each image for the full scale picture.

Performance stats, and completed VMotion (in Recent Tasks at bottom)

Datastore browser