I have not seen a thread on this topic yet but may have overseen something ... please excuse me in this case and direct me to such an existing thread.
Now that the vSphere client is apparently going away, i.e. there will not be a new version with the next vSphere version ... How are we going to manage future ESXi versions directly, without vCenter?
My concern is not a standalone (free) hypervisor. We are running vSphere with vCenter right now. But from time to time I need to manage one of the underlying ESXi hosts directly, such as when I perform maintenance or upgrades to the vCenter VM itself. This often means stopping the VirtualCenter or even all vCenter tasks and when I then need to go back to a snapshot of it (such as when some upgrade went wrong), I need to use the vSphere client directly against the ESXi host.
When the vCenter client is replaced with the Web client completely in the next vSphere release, what is the plan for this scenario? Will ESXi also get a builtin web client? Will I need a VMWare Workstation to manage it (this works already today for a subset of the functionality)?