We will be purchasing 7 new HPE DL380 Gen10 or Dell R740 servers in the next month. In production it will be two servers for server virtualization and three for VDI. The three for VDI will have the nVidia Tesla cards installed. In our DR site there will be two new servers. I am still debating whether to install ESXi 6.0 or 6.5 on these new servers. Here are the considerations:
- Thick/C# client versus web client. My understanding is there are actually two versions of the web client:
- One web client uses Adobe Flash and is considered buggy and slow. On this forum there is a post entitled "vSphere Web Client SUCKs so bad that my experience managing and supporting VMware has turn to SH**!". This is the single most commented on post ever. There is enormous anger in the community about how bad this web based client is. We are still running ESXi 6.0 on our 5 year old servers and using the C# client
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/477686 - There is an HTML5 client that is considered stable and fast enough. The problem is currently it is missing a bunch of features forcing people to still use the Flash based client often. Rumor has it that when ESXi 6.7 comes out, they will be releasing a full featured version of the HTML5 client.
- One web client uses Adobe Flash and is considered buggy and slow. On this forum there is a post entitled "vSphere Web Client SUCKs so bad that my experience managing and supporting VMware has turn to SH**!". This is the single most commented on post ever. There is enormous anger in the community about how bad this web based client is. We are still running ESXi 6.0 on our 5 year old servers and using the C# client
- I did look on VMWare's hardware compatibility site and either ESXi 6.0 or 6.5 are supported on the latest servers from HPE and Dell
- The vSphere client (whether C#, Web based Flash, or HTML5) hooks into a vCenter server. Right now our two vCenter servers run under Windows Server 2012 R2. VMWare has ditched this setup going forward and has released a Linux based appliance for vCenter. It would be nice to jump to this Linux appliance but that means going to ESXi 6.5
- The desire to be current on our infrastructure which is ESXi 6.5
- Lastly, there is still a major bug in ESXi 6.5 even though it was released a year ago. This bug may be fixed by the time we purchase but it may not be. This bug can lead to a pink screen of death on an ESXi host
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2151749
Suggestions on which way to jump?