A web based interface for my ESXi home lab

Managing ESXi

The free VMware ESXi hypervisor is very good for creating a virtual lab at home. But its main limitation is the lack of a web based management interface.
Administering ESXi requires installing the VMware vSphere Client, that has two drawbacks:

• It requires a Windows PC to run
• It is no longer improved by VMware

In fact the VMware strategic management interface is the web based interface that is included in the full vSphere infrastructure. But there is no free license for it.
No longer being the strategic direction, the vSphere Client development has slowed down. As a consequence it now has some limitations, like the inability of editing few parameters of the latest VMware virtual hardware.

But VMware has release a beta version of a new web interface that can be installed directly on ESXi.

The "ESXi embedded host client": a Web based interface

The VMware Labs have released, as part of the Flings project, a web interface for ESXi, named "ESXi embedded host client". More details are available at the project web page:

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxi-embedded-host-client

The page provides a description of the interface, information about its development and instructions for installing it (see the Instructions tab in that page). The interface is distributed as a vib and requires no post install configurations. Once installed, the UI is immediately available at:

https://esxi-host-name/ui

I have installed version 3.0 on my ESXi home lab, and, while it is still in beta, it works quite well. And I really enjoy the ability to power on and off VMs from virtually any device that has a web browser, without the need of using a PC.

Being a beta, it currently has also some bugs. For example, I used the web interface for adding to the inventory VMs from my data stores. While the network card appeared to be properly connected to the "VM Network", the virtual machine had no network connectivity. Checking the VM configuration from the vSphere Client revealed that the network card was indeed misconfigured.

Anyhow, besides some current bugs (that will be very likely fixed in future releases), I strongly suggest installing it and I'm very happy of having it available on my ESXi server.