I’ve been running VMware ESXi 3.5 on one of our servers at work; I have been also been running the VMware Infrastructure Client (for 3.5) and it worked just perfectly. Now I’m going to upgrade to EXSi 4.0, so I figured I’d upgrade VMwave vSphere, which seems to be the exact same software. Anyways, as it turns out this wonderful new client is not Windows 7 compatible (oh yea, I’m running on Windows 7 x64 in case I forgot to mention that).
vSphere launched properly but as soon as I tried to connect to the server, I got the following:
Error Parsing the server “
” “clients.xml” file Login will continue contact your system administrator
Followed directly by:
The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastrcture.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception
After a bit of digging I found the
workaround on the VMware forum. The instructions are as follows, with paths as they would be for a default install on a 64bit machine (if you’re on a 32bit machine, just use “\Program Files\”):
- Go to a non-Windows 7 machine and grab: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll
- Create the directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
- Edit: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe.config
- Add the following directly above
- Save
- Create & Edit: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.bat
- Add the following contents:
SET DEVPATH=%ProgramFiles(x86)%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
“%ProgramFiles(x86)%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe”
- Save & Run Batch File!
Remember, if you’re on 32bit, use “\Program Files\” instead of “\Program Files (x86)\” and use “%ProgramFiles%” instead of “%ProgramFiles(x86)%”. As of this writing, there is no other way to use the new vSphere on Windows 7, and probably wont be “officially” supported until Windows 7 comes out in October. I’ve noticed that there are a few minor graphical glitches and the software runs a fair bit slower. Which is why I wanted it to be clear that this was a “workaround” rather than a proper fix. Also, with the changes to the .config file, vSphere will no longer launch properly from the Start menu (you must use the batch file) and this does not fix the vSphere Host Update Utility which suffers a similar problem (I suspect it could be fixed with a similar solution, but haven’t tried).