VMware vSphere Client on VMware Server 2

I’ve played around with VMware a fair bit and whilst there is no doubt that ESX and ESXi have some impressive features, it was not really plausible for me for a few reasons:

My server has 2 disks, but no hardware RAID. Running without RAID is not really an option, i tried to think of a few ways around this – installing ESXi to both drives and then scripting snapshots to copy over to the non-active datastore drive. THis would in theory allow me to reboot on the other drive and then rebuild/reimport the VM. The problem being, my host allows clients to rebuild their server through their portal, however you cannot specify to leave the 2nd drive untouched – so as/when i needed to reinstall the 1st drive it would wipe out the 2nd ;)
No software firewall or ACLs on ESXi, leave my host wide open on port 22, 443 and any others it cared to open. Yes i could try moving the service console to a private network connected via a Linux VM then tunnel, if the VM died id have to reboot the entire server.
I wanted to run OpenVPN on the host, installation of packages/programs such as this in ESXi is not possible.

So, i settled on VMware Server 2. The main problem i see with this product, from my point of view, is the web management console/gui – it sucks. It would crash and hang and force me to clear browser cache, even then not working when i needed it most. So i set about seeing whether or not i could use the vSphere Client to connect to VMware Server – incidentally VMware Server 1 got it right with a proper software client, so we seem to be going backwards here in some regards! To my horror, and after trying myself, it didnt seem it was possible! Or was it…

During my Google searching i came across this:

http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-manage-vmware-server-20x.html

One of the comments, by a guy called Tiddler, seemed to offer some hope of a way to get this to work.

I had the same issue with this that Cenk Kulacoglu had. It turns out that on a fresh install, the VI Client (or vSphere Client) is missing the necessary v2.5 DLLs to talk to VMware server 2.0.

This files need to be extracted to C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client or C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client if 64-bit. Inside of that folder you’ll notice there is already a 4.0 folder. After extracting this rar to the previously mentioned location, you’ll notice a 2.5 folder as well. This should fix anyone with the issue of the Server complaining you need to download an “update”.

The files you need a located here http://www.slashdevslashnull.com/wp-content/uploads/2.5.rar

Enjoy!