As you might have seen over the last couple of days VMware has announced that a few components and or features will be deprecated in the next major release of vSphere. The next release of vSphere will be a terminal release and the information in this blog post does not apply.
vCenter Server for Windows
The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) was introduced with the release of vSphere 5.0 (2011) many years ago. First it was mostly used in dev and test environments since there were a lot of features missing compared to the Windows based vCenter Server that has been around since vSphere 3.0. On top of the missing features the vCSA scalability was not even close to the Windows based vCenter Server.
However, over the years the vCSA has improved a today it is superior to the Windows based vCenter Server according to VMware, read more here about that, and I totally agree. Almost all my deployments these days uses the vCSA and it is for a good reason. It is easy to deploy and manage and it got the following built-in capabilities:
- High Availability
- Better performance than the Windows based vCenter Server
- File-based backup and restore
- Simplified update and patching
There is a good migration tool available here which you can use to move from the Windows based vCenter Server to vCSA.
Read more about the deprecating of Windows based vCenter Server here.
vSphere Web Client
The vSphere Web Client was VMware initiative to create a web based client which was suppose (and it did after a few years) to replace the Windows based vSphere Client (C#). It has been around for a few years and was using Flash to provide its functionality. The vSphere Web Client has seen some performance problems over the years and since it is based on Flash it constantly requires updates.
Another web (HTML5) based client was first introduced as a Fling and then it was GA ready with the release of vSphere 6.5. Not all vSphere Web Client functionality was introduced initially in the HTML5 based web client but in vSphere 6.5 U1 release another set of functionality was added. I’m sure everything included in the vSphere Web Based Client will be included in the HTML5 based web client before the vSphere Web Client is gone.
Read more about the deprecating of vSphere Web Client here
vmkLinux APIs
VMware will also deprecate the vmkLinux APIs and its associated driver ecosystem that has been around for ages. Instead all new development must be using the vSphere kernel native API and its associated native I/O driver ecosystem which was introduced quite long ago, actually back with the vSphere 5.5 (2013) release. There are multiple advantages using the native driver model & its ecosystem according to VMware and it has been adapted by many I/O vendors from vSphere 6.0.
Read more about the deprecating of vmkLinux APIs here