Removing VM Clutter From The vSphere Client “Host And Clusters” View
This is a quick tip, but one that I find extremely helpful (especially in large environments). The vSphere Client has a bunch of little gold nuggets hidden away to make life easier, from changing perspectives to adding tabs. When in the “Hosts and Clusters” view, the window can be highly cluttered with virtual machines, making it more difficult to lock down on the hosts and / or clusters you’re looking to work with. As shown below, even my little home lab requires scrolling to go between vCenter instances (production and DR).
If you click on the View menu, one of the options is “Show VMs in Inventory” and is enabled by default.
If you disable this option, you will only see the hosts, clusters, and resource pools.
Known Crash Issue
Got a tweet pretty quickly from @joefilippello about a potential crash issue. If you do hide the VMs, don’t search for a VM in Host and Cluster view or it will crash the vSphere Client. I just tried this and confirmed on vSphere Client 5.X
I rarely use the search inventory box, so I never would have known.
Did you find a way to save that setting? Also, there’s a bug: When you searcha VM in the search box and klick it the Client freezes.
This is one of my biggest niggles with the VI client. I’ve chosen Hosts and clusters view, don’t show me VMs! If I wanted to see them I’d use the various VM views. It would be fine if the setting you describe was persistent but it’s re-enabled every time you swap to this view. Grrr!
I never really considered that, as I tend to just leave mine open for long periods of time, but I can see how that is annoying. Watching procmon while toggling the setting hasn’t led me to any easy answers.
vSphere Client stops responding when Virtual Machines are hidden from view
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2016224
That mystic bug with the setting reverting as soon as you go into VM and Templates has been around since at least 4.x. Very strange. I agree that it is nice to be able to remove the VMs from the Host and Clusters vire.