Flash Player and VMware Management Consoles – What to do

Hi! Thanks for joining me back at this new post. We will be talking about what to do if you came up with the Flash Player End of Life and you are not ready for upgrading your infrastructure. If you are ready for upgrade, I have wrote down some tips on how to check VMware products upgrade path and compatibility matrix.

Most of you might noticed that when accesing some VMware mangement consoles (eg: vCenter, Horizon View, etc) that uses Flash, an icon like the one below will be shown because of Flash EOL on January 12, 2021 https://www.adobe.com/la/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

Internet Explorer:

Google Chrome:

What can we do to address this?

First and foremost, do not panic, it only affects your management console but not your virtual machines or services like Horizon. Everything will keep on working as it was before.

If you are on a critical situation and need to access immediately follow the VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78589

I have tested it on Internet Explorer and it worked like a charm.

Original file:

Modified file:

Gained acces again, Woho!

If you are not on a critical situation, plan you upgrade, check the product interoperability matrix and the upgrade path of each product you have on the same situation, or products related to the ones that you will need to upgrade.

The product interoperatibility matrix will tell you if a product is compatible with another one (eg: vCenter with Horizon, vCenter with NSX, etc).

The upgrade path will tell you which upgrades from version to version are supported, so you can plan if multiple upgrades are required to reach the desired state. Let’s suppose going from Horizon 6.2.9 to Horizon 8 (2012) you will need an intermediate upgrade to Horizon 7.13, and then Horizon 8 (2012)

Product Interoperatibility Matrix: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php

Upgrade Path: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#upgrade

How to use Product Interoperatibilit Matrix? It’s very easy. Just select at least two products (you can select more than one at “2. Add Platform/Solution”) and It will display if they are compatible or not.

If the products selected have a green check, good to go, plan the upgrade (check the upgrade path section too, it’s very important) and also plan a rollback just in case is needed (eg: backup, snapshots, etc). If you got into a failure open a support case with VMware https://www.vmware.com/support/file-sr.html
*You must have your support up to date to have support. Contact VMware or your Partner to renew it.

If a red line is displayed, do not try that combination of versions, its incompatible and the product might work in an unexpected and unsupported way.

If a grey line is displayed, they are not supported. You will have to find a combination that might work for you and the corresponding upgrade path if the products are linked in some way. A situation like this might be upgrading vCenter from 6.5 U2 to 7.0 U1 and NSX-V from 6.3.7 to 6.4.9. You will need to upgrade first NSX-V from 6.3.7 to 6.4.6, then vCenter from 6.5 U2 to 6.7 U3 (you can not jump directly to 7.0 U1 because NSX-V would not support it based on product interoperatibility matrix), then NSX-V from 6.4.6 to 6.4.9 and again vCentr from 6.7 U3 to 7.0 U1.