The Web Client will be VMware’s direction going forward. It was stressed more than once. There was even a slide from one the sessions to state that 5.1 will be the last windows based client – as I blogged about before here.

If you stop for a moment to think about this it makes sense. VMware is looking to remove any kid of dependency on the Microsoft operating system. We have seen it with move to a direct of a center appliance and now with the new client. I am sure this will be a glorious day for all the Admins who have a Mac and up until now relied on a Windows VM running in Fusion to manage there vSphere environments. Gone now are those days.

Onyx - remember the fling that VMware have to allow you "peak" into the API? This has proven to be a invaluable tool more than once, not only for me but for anyone who is trying to programmatically perform some kind of operation be it PowerCLI or now more popular – vOrchestrator.

A multitude of posts can be found about the subject – here are just a small few:

• ONYX - Go forth and PowerCLI'ze!
• Taking the new Onyx 2.0 for a spin
• How to create Powershell Scripts Using VMware Onyx
• VMware Onyx
• Using Onyx to speed-up Workflow development

But new with the web client this will not be possible (at least not at the moment) until VMware releases an update or some other tool to provide this functionality. Which does become problematic, because there is no way to find the API calls that are now going through the new client. And since a sizeable amount of functionality is no longer available in the Windows client – it will not be so simple to find the correct calls.

I can say that this update is coming - Luc Dekens actually raised this question in session GD26 with William Lam, and they are aware of this problem. When it will be released - I don't know.

This does just show me that this is a perfect example of how things can become complicated, the larger and more intertwined a solution becomes. Who would have thought that Onyx would have become such a useful tool, and that the community would make such good use of it, to a point that they cannot do things without it. And it has to be modified or replaced to continue to support the community.

The new client will make things a lot easier moving forward. It will be interesting to see how people find ways to extend the functionality of the the client. I think we will all be quite surprised.

If anyone has an idea on how to get the API calls going through the new client – please feel free share them in the comments below.