What Is vCenter Web Client and How to Access It

What is vCenter web client

vCenter server is a centralized management tool for managing virtual machines, ESXi hosts and all attached components. To access vCenter server, you could use the vSphere web client to connect to your vCenter server system to manage an ESXi host through a browser.

System administrators can access vCenter server remotely to create, clone and manage virtual machines through the vSphere web client. Compared to other management platforms, vCenter greatly improves IT administrators' control over virtual environments, providing a scalable and extensible platform.

However, the VMware host client is different from the vSphere web client. As we mentioned, vSphere web client allows you to connect to a vCenter server and manage multiple ESXi hosts. Whereas, the VMware Host Client is an HTML5-based client that is used to connect to and manage single ESXi hosts.

How to access vCenter web client

Whether you have dozens of virtual machines or thousands, vCenter is the easiest and most efficient way to manage your VMware environment. All hosts and virtual machines in the datacenter can be unified and managed from a single console that brings together cluster, host and virtual machine performance monitoring capabilities.

Here are steps to log in to vCenter server by using the vSphere web client.

Note: To access the vCenter server web client, you need to have an account with vCenter server. Once you have an account, you can use your credentials to log in to the Web client. The following are the steps on how to log in to vCenter server by using the vSphere client:

1. Open one Web browser and enter the URL of the vCenter server instance: https://vcenter_server_ip_address_or_fqdn or vSphere client’s URL: https://vcenter_server_ip_address_or_fqdn/ui. (If a warning message about a potential security risk appears, select continue to this site)

2. On the vSphere Welcome page, select Launch vSphere client (HTML5).

(If a warning message about potential security risks reappears, select continue to this site).

3. Enter the credentials of the user who has privileges to the vCenter server and click Log In.

What is the vSphere suite

vSphere, formerly VMware Infrastructure, is a server virtualization product from VMware. vSphere is a software suite with several components, including ESXi, vCenter, vSphere client, and more. It is a system that can be installed and run independently on bare metal, so unlike other VMware Workstation software it is no longer dependent on the host operating system. We can access vCenter server through the vSphere client to create, clone and manage virtual machines.

• vCenter server: Used to centrally manage all resources in a virtualized environment, including hosts, virtual machines, storage, and networking.
• ESXi: The base operating system used to host virtual machines and applications.
• vSphere web client: Accessed through a web browser and provides a visual interface to manage the virtualized environment.
• vSphere client: Provides a desktop client interface for connecting to vCenter server to manage virtualization resources.
• vMotion: Supports rapid migration of virtual machines for maintenance or load balancing of physical hosts.
• Storage vMotion: Supports rapid storage migration of virtual machines for maintenance or upgrade of storage systems.
• High Availability (HA): Provides automatic failover to enable fast recovery of virtual machines in the event of a hardware failure.
• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS): dynamically allocates CPU and memory resources based on resource usage to achieve resource balancing.
• vSphere Replication: Provides virtual machine-level replication for data backup and disaster recovery.

How to backup VMs managed by vCenter server

From the management perspective, vCenter can centralize the management of ESXi hosts, making it easier for us to manage and access ESXi hosts. From a functional perspective, many of the core functions of vSphere are implemented through vCenter.

However, vCenter can't prevent accidents, so we still need to back up our data since it could be a matter of survival of a company.

So here is AOMEI Cyber Backup, a VMware backup software that allows you to back up multiple running virtual machines, either managed by vCenter Server or on a separate ESXi host. The setup of AOMEI Cyber Backup takes no longer than 10 minutes from downloading AOMEI Cyber Backup to adding virtual machines from VMware vCenter or standalone ESXi host in the centralized web console.

✢ Agentless Image Backup: create independent and image-based backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs. ✢ Support Free ESXi: Support both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi. ✢ Various Backup Methods: Besides full backup, you can perform incremental or differential VM backup to capture only changed data and save storage space. ✢ Automated Hot Backup: Auto backup running VMs and notify via email. ✢ Restore from Any Point: Restore a whole VM to usable state from any history backup version.

Steps to quickly back up virtual machines managed by vCenter

Step 1. Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, select Source Device, click VMware to bind your vCenter device directly.

Step 2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task and Create New Task. Then select VMware ESXi Backup for Backup Type. After that, set the Task Name, Device, Target, Schedule and Cleanup according to your need.

Step 3. Click Start Backup and choose Add the schedule and start backup now or Add the schedule only.

Step 4. When your backups are completed, it’s easy to restore your virtual machines to another place when a disaster strikes. Navigate to Start Restore, you can change restore location here to create a new VM or another datastore/host.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you will learn how to access vCenter web client and how to log in to it. Besides, do not forget to protect your virtual machines even under vCenter server.