The blog has been quiet for quite some time, but I think it’s time to resume even if it is with the smaller things. Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage 6.7 class in Bucharest, Romania. There are unfortunately still in 6.7 GA some small things that require the use of the now end of life vSphere Web Client. At the same time, VMware decided to still utilize the vSphere Web Client in quite a number of their lab exercises. In the lab, the students experienced an issue I had not encountered before when using the Firefox browser they were unable to input text into the vSphere Web Client.
Of course, we attempted to find a workaround and a few possibilities came up:
- Change the size of the window, fx go from maximized window to non-maximized window
- Click outside of the window and click back into the window
However, these are indeed just workarounds and quite annoying so the journey continued. After some Google-Fu I came to this thread where fellow vExpert Murali Sripada has posted a suggested resolution of using Firefox 32 bit instead of 64 bit. Now you might ask, why not simply use a different browser such as Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 11? Excellent question! The issue is the lab guide VMware provides to the students tells them to use Firefox.
Does this cause any issues? I think the Authentication Plugin VMware provides is not fully compatible with Firefox 32-bit, which is a different issue… so, in the end, I guess I will keep Firefox 64-bit and tell my students to use IE11 for vSphere Web Client labs after all.