How to register a vCenter Server with a Web Client

Today I want to write a post explaining how to solve a recurring problem when trying to access the vSphere Web Client for the first time in a freshly installed environment.

Once you have installed the vSphere WebClient, the procedure (page 21 of this VMWare doc) says that you have to register your vCenter Server to it locally on the server where the WebClient is installed. So you open a browser, for sure Internet Explorer because we suppose this is a clean environment and you shouldn't have other browsers such as Firefox or Chrome on a Windows server. Then a problem arise when you try to connect to https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com/vsphere-client/

In fact you get a red error message saying:

"This vCenter Server is not currently registered with a vSphere Web Client. Please use vSphere Client Administration Tool (https://localhost:{port-number}/admin-app) on the machine running vSphere Web Client to register this vCenter Server."

Here's a screenshot of this error:

Following the instruction you are given by this message, you move to https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com/admin-app and another error message appear:

"To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.1.0 or greater is installed."

At this point you must be thinking that this is not your lucky day and you feel like deceived by VMWare  for forcing you to install Flash on your production server. Luckily, there is a workaround to this. Onto the Web Client server, open a command prompt and move to the following folder:

cd "d:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphereWebClient\scripts"

In there there are two files:

26/03/2013  10:04               378 admin-cmd.bat
15/02/2012  08:57             1 025 admin-cmd.sh

You have to run the batch (you are on Windows!):

admin-cmd.bat register https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com:9443/vsphere-client https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com\ admin password

where 'admin' is the user account used to administer your vCenter installation and 'password' is ... its password. (Note that if you get an error message saying that your SSL certificate is not approved, just press 'A' to continue). Now that you have properly registered the service, you should be able to login to the vSphere Web Client at this address:

https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com:9443/vsphere-client/

For this last step, use a remote machine with Flash player installed.

If you wish to force the interface of the Web Client to English, use this link instead:

https://yourvCenter.yourdomain.com:9443/vsphere-client/?locale=en_US

Also remember to set at least Read-Only permission for your users to the root of the VirtualCenter, otherwise your users might get into the 'Loading ...' bug which I described here.

Hope this helps!