The vSphere Web Client was released in vSphere 5.0, but it had only a subset of the features of vSphere Client until a fully featured vSphere Web Client was released in vSphere 5.1. VMware has made numerous improvements to vSphere Web Client in vSphere 5.5 (including drag-and-drop and Mac OS X support), further asserting it as the future of management interfaces. All the new vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 features have been made available solely in vSphere Web Client; due to this, it is important to familiarize ourselves with the Web Client.

In order to launch the virtual machine creation wizard, open vSphere Web Client and navigate to one of the vCenter views. From there, right-click on a container that a virtual machine can reside in (Cluster, ESXi host, resource pool, among others) and select New Virtual Machine....

The next screenshot shows all of vSphere Web Client's available options in the New Virtual Machine wizard. The other options will be discussed in...