Difference between Web Client and Fat Client (and PowerCLI 'client') - vSphere 5.5

Note that VMware vSphere 5.5 VM's can be managed with VMware Workstation 10 and higher.

This article is an attempt to maintain a comparison between vCenter Web Client and the vCenter .net Client (aka, Fat Client).

Feature	.Net Client (Fat Client)	Web Client	PowerCLI
VMotion VM between Datastore AND Host at the same time	No	yes	yes
VMotion between Hosts	Yes	Yes	Yes
Vmotion Between Clusters	No	Yes	Yes
VMotion Between Datacenter	No	Yes	Yes
VMotion Between vCenters (requires Linked Mode)	No	Yes	Yes
Schedule vHardware Upgrade	No	Yes	Yes
Edit VM's with VMX-10 vHardware Supported Versions[vi]: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007240	No	Yes	Yes
Hot Add vCpu & vMem to VM While Power On -- Windows 2008 and lower	Yes	Yes	Yes
For Windows 2012r2	No	Yes	Yes
vCenter UpdateManager Scan	Yes	Yes	Yes
vCenter UpdateManager Patch	No	Yes	Yes
Alerts - Acknowledge and Clear	Yes	Yes	Not Native
Host Profile Creation	Yes	Yes	Yes
Host Profile Editing	Limited	Yes	Limited

 

Vmware has pretty much screwed up Host Profiles. It worked great in 4.0. Got worse with 5.0/5.1. It's no better in 5.5. The mitigating aspect of HostProfiles is that you can script away with PowerCLI most of the HostProfile frailties. That said, why use HostProfiles at all if you can standardize a VMhost configuration with scripts?