Once your ESXi-host is up and running and you have multiple virtual machines running and maybe also vCenter deployed as a virtual appliance then you can access the console of those virtual machines with VMware Player. Access your VM-console from Linux or Mac OS X with a VMware Player-console But from time to time there are Windows-based applications for which there really is no alternative and for those cases I have a Windows VM on my laptop. I personally run openSUSE and work with Linux for the largest part of the day. To work with the full vSphere Client on Windows you can run it in a Windows virtual machine or from a physical Windows computer to configure the ESXi-host and create virtual machines. Run a Windows VM in Player, Workstation or Fusion How to do this is explained in this article.

It is also possible to import the appliance from the command line with VMware's OVF Tool, which is available for Linux and Windows. But you would always need the vSphere Client on Windows at least once after installation of ESXi to for example import the vCenter Virtual Appliance ( explained here) Or to create a virtual machine. There are a few tools that you can use to make administration for your environment simpler.

So what do you do when your vCenter server is down or what to do if you only have one ESXi server? The only problem with that is that it only works with vCenter. And you can access that from your Linux system and Mac OS X. The longer answer is: do you need one? And is there an alternative? For most day to day operations you should move to the vSphere Web Client. If you are using a Linux-based pc or Mac OS X and want to manage a vSphere-environment then you might ask yourself the question if there is a native OS-version of the vSphere Client available for your platform.

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