VMware vCloud Director 10.0 – Enabling the Previous FlexUI Interface

Since VMware vCloud Director 10.0 has gone generally available as of last week, the release notes have been posted that show what has made the cut for this release.

My VMware vCloud Director 10.0 – What’s New Series – Part 1 and Part 2

One thing that has been a discussion point is the transition to the HTML5 Clarity interface. This has been a phased approach and significant effort (and investment!) was put into 10.0 to get this over the finish line. Well, if one takes a look at the release notes, you’ll notice a few things missing from the H5 UI that might be pertinent to your environment:

Stuff happens – in software development, it’s all about a juggle of priorities. Our team’s goal is to attempt to stick to this ~6 month cadence release and there might be items that may not make the cut. While I’m bummed there’s a few things that didn’t make this release, I know our team is working as hard as possible to get this fully complete.

After upgrade or deployment of vCD 10.0, you will notice that the previous FlexUI is not available. When attempting to append “/cloud” to the URL, it will revert to the new “/provider” context –

By default, the FlexUI interface is turned off. This has to be re-enabled (if required) on a per-cell basis.

So, how does the provider re-enable the previous FlexUI interface? Pretty simple.

Enabling FlexUI Interface in vCD 10.0

SSH to your vCD instance

Unless the “cell-management-tool” is in your source path, change directory to /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin

cd /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin

Now, we will utilize the cell-management-tool to enable the FlexUI.

./cell-management-tool manage-config -n flex.ui.enabled -v true

Next, reboot or restart vCD services! This must be done on ALL cells.

service vmware-vcd restart

Once vCD is operational, one can now browse to “/cloud” to access the previous UI.

With vCloud Director 10.0, I see this an interim step until we close this minor gap in the UI. The great thing is this can be disabled easily at a later time once the missing UI items are added.

Happy upgrading to vCD 10.0!

-Daniel