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Comment by cjoelrun | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what your use case is, but why not build your own tools? As a previous user of OpenStack, the UI was not terrible but as an administrator I found it useless except very simple things. I wrote scripts for tasks regularly carried out.

I haven't had experience with vSphere's UI, but if it's anywhere as terrible as the vCloud Director UI, why not write some stuff to make your life easier. VMware recently open sourced some vSphere python bindings: https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi

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I was wondering if vCloud Director and vSphere Web UI were the same thing. From your comment, I infer that they aren't - is that right? I'm currently trying to build out virtual infrastructure on a trial from a preferred supplier at work, and they use vCloud. My interactions with the web UI have left me ranting in the office to the point where my cow-orkers look nervous. A combo of flash, Java, proprietary plugins and highly browser-specific code is a recipe for disaster. Some tasks only work on my Windows VM (e.g. uploading media) and some only Linux (e.g. virtual consoles). I'm told I have to use FF 29 or IE9 only - nothing else will work. It frankly unbelievable that they would ship this junk, and its dog slow. Are there any alternatives that you know of? Even API bindings maybe? I don't know how long I'll be using this, but if my company decides to take up the product long term I'll need some alternative to keep me sane.

I am tempted more and more each day if I knew that I could get SRM and few other choice options working I would spend the time. Thanks for that pyvmomi link I am going to check that out right now.

If you are on a windows machine it might be worth looking at PowerCLI [1] as well, it has a very active community and they just started added some basic cmdlets to access to the SRM public API [2].

[1] http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/ [2] http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2014/03/new-release-vsphere...

Now this is something that I have been doing is looking at tasks I can accomplish from PowerCLI and I do like it well enough. It may be that this is more the direction I should be looking instead of client (web/C#) based solutions...

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