vSphere 6 features previewed at VMworld 2014, including much better vSphere Web Client performance

Great video below from Eric Sloof's interview with VMware's Mike Foley at VMworld last week. Yes, the same Mike I've had the opportunity to hang out with twice now, at two different VMUGs, see our recent trip to New York City's New York Times building here. I like that he was rather loose lipped about what's coming up next.

I quite enjoyed watching Eric polite but spot on questions about the upcoming improvements to the performance of vSphere Web Client, and Mike's response. Here's some of the highlights:

Eric: The vSphere Web Client, I hear people complain about the web client a little, me as an instructor, I get students who have to cope with sometimes a bit sloggy web client, are there any improvements?

Mike: Sure, a lot of improvements are here, we have gone through the web client soup to nuts, it's still Flex based, but we've optimized it, we've optimized a lot of the workflows, we've optimized the response time significantly. I played around with an early beta about a month or two ago, and I was amazed. I was like I need this right now, right? We've also changed the layout. So the C# client which we're going to continue supplying, and we've updated it to be able to manage those VMware Version 10, that was a big big pushback on us, we're going to keep that around for things like VUM and such. And that is renamed the host client, so that's great for managing that single host. But once you get into vCenter, we've changed the look and feel of the web client to more closely match the C# client...there was a lot of hunting and pecking and frustration. So now...say for example the recent tasks, are now along the bottom, just like in the C# client. And with the response time much better it'll feel a lot more like a native app.

I think people will be really happy.

At a work related event I attended at IBM in New York City yesterday, I got to talking to a guy who was at VMworld 2014. He mentioned one of the few notable vSphere/ESXi 6.0 mentions from the conference, where a keynote speaker's audience let out a very audible reaction to the promise of better vSphere Web Client performance. That story, and Eric's short interview, speaks volumes about the importance of keeping admins happy.

Enjoy the full video here: