Riccardo Riva

How To run VMware vSphere Client on Windows 7

November 17th, 2009 |

Hi all,

unfortunately I’m trying Windows 7 as my primary notebook OS (obviously on a Virtual Machine) and the main problem I’ve found was the inability to run VMware Vsphere client.

As you can see below, the client was installed correctly without any errors :

Vsphere Client 01

When attempting to run the client I’ve received the following errors and I was unable to proceed in any way :

“Error parsing the server “<server name” “clients.xml” file.”

Vsphere Client 02

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

Vsphere Client 03

Luckily there have been a few good VMware communities forum posts .

Follow these 4 basic steps and you should use the client in a couple of minutes.

Step 1.

Download this DLL called system.dll

*Note: This DLL is usually found in the %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ directory of a non Windows 7 PC with .NET v3.5 SP1 installed.

Step 2.

Once downloaded copy it in the “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\lib” directory. If the ‘lib’ directory doesn’t exist, create it and copy the dll file into it.

Step 3.

Edit the “VpxClient.exe.config” file which can be found in the “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher” directory and add the following three lines to it in the location specified in the screenshot below. Then save the changes.

<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation>
</runtime>

Vsphere Client 04

Vsphere Client 05

Step 4.

From the Windows 7 ‘System Properties’ click the ‘Advanced’ tab and then the ‘Environment Variables’ button as we want to add a new ‘System’ variable.

Create a new ‘System’ variable called ‘DEVPATH’ and assign the following variable value:

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib