After months of waiting for VMware to make Update 1 available for vSphere/vCenter 5.1, it finally arrived. We had hoped that it would provide fixes to some half-baked items that we had noticed after deploying vCenter 5.1. As of right now, I personally can’t say if those issues or annoyances we found have been fixed or not.

Unfortunately, I can’t login to the “preferred” web client that VMware wants us to adopt so bad.

Why?

According to KB article 2050941, my admin account that I login to vCenter belongs to too many groups in Active Directory. Are you kidding me? It says that there is not a definitive number of groups that is the threshold but is normally around 19. I belong to 24 while my co-worker that can login belongs to 20. Clearly our threshold is somewhere in there. My question is how long has VMware been running 5.1 U1 in their labs and somehow never noticed this issue?

There are three workarounds for this issue.

• Log in to vCenter Server via the vSphere Client using the Use Windows session credentials option. – So now I need to use a client that doesn’t include the new 5.1 features?
• Work with your Active Directory administrator to modify the group membership of the vCenter Server login account to a minimum. – hahaha! There’s a reason why I belong to so many groups. My day-to-day activities depend on those memberships.
• Limit the number of domain based identity sources to no more than one. – We have users from around the world logging in that need those identity sources available. Odds are most of them can’t login either though.

Yet again, VMware has released more software/updates that seem to be half-baked and not fully tested for even the largest of their customers. This just adds more fuel to the fire that is pushing us to really consider Microsoft’s latest Hyper-V release. Twelve hosts yet to be ordered this year for a refresh of old vSphere hosts in our environment. Maybe they will be Hyper-V hosts instead.