Akom's Tech Ruminations

As everyone who uses this product eventually finds out, VMware vSphere (5.5) browser-based web client will generally work in Linux (at least in chrome), but opening a server console is nearly impossible. The web client requires flash 11.5, and of course there is no linux flash above 11.2...

After a lot of dancing I managed to get it working in Firefox 40.0.3 on Ubuntu 15.04. Here are are the steps in a nutshell:

1. Clear out your ~/.mozilla ... True, you may not need to, but I did. Start firefox once, then exit.
2. Install pipelight
3. Enable flash in pipelight (I wound up doing this globally and for current user, not sure which one did it
4. Install the VMware client integration plugin (if you did before, uninstall and reinstall). That's the download you get on the bottom of the vSphere login page
5. Start firefox and see if it works. If not, fiddle with the plugins (under extensions). You may see two versions of flash. I was not able to disable 11.2 from the UI without also disabling version 18 from pipelight - so I wound up deleting /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so (but you can also apt-get remove flashplugin-installer)
6. Explicitly go to extensions again and switch all VMware items to "Always Activate"
7. Restart firefox over and over throughout the process

Good luck



Update: After some system updates, the pipelight plugins stopped appearing in Firefox, and needless to say nothing worked. Deleting ~/.mozilla again seemed to resolve it (You then have to switch all the plugins to "Always Activate" again).