In my last Windows 7 blog post I wrote about an issue I was having running VMWare vSphere Client 4.0 on Windows 7 RTM 64 bit. Further research shows that this issue occurs in all versions of Windows 7. VMWare will most likely have to release a patch for their software as Windows 7 is now final. Thanks to this VMWare community post I was pointed to the right direction to fix it.

Problem
Although vSphere Client installs fine, when you try to connect to any server you get this error:

Error parsing the server “serverIP” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

Immediately followed by this error:

The type initializer for ‘VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception.

Solution

1. Obtain a copy of C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll from a non Windows 7 machine that has .NET 3.5 SP1 installed. You can also download the file from here (recommended for step 3)
2. Create a folder in the Windows 7 machine where the vSphere client is installed and copy the file from step 1 into this folder. For this example, create the folder under the vSphere client launcher installation directory and call it Lib+ (C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+) for 32 bit versions (C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+)
3. Copy the VpxClient.exe.config from the zip in step 1 and put it in the “Launder” directory, overwriting the current file. What this is doing is adding a runtime option so you can run vSphere in developer mode.
4. In the same “Launcher” directory (doesn’t matter where really) right click and create a new “Text Document” and name it VpxClient.cmd (remove the .txt part) Open the file with notepad and for 64 bit put this in:
   

   @echo Off
   SET DEVPATH=%ProgramFiles(x86)%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+
   “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe”

   For 32 bit:
   

   @echo Off
   SET DEVPATH=%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+
   “%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe”

Thanks to the people on the VMWare communities forum that pointed me in the right direction for this. Hopefully VMWare comes out with a fix soon. For now this will do, it beats running a VM to administer other VM’s

Till Next Time,
Jorge Orchilles