As you might have already seen the warning while using the chrome browser: “Flash Player will no longer be supported after December 2020”.

Now this Message might not mean anything to you, but if you are an IT Admin and have an existing VMware Environment running below 6.7. You will be worried.

The reason for your worries is valid as well, because without Flash there will be no vSphere Client and with the other Client which is the Web Client runs on Partial Features.

Flash by Adobe is going to be End of Life (EOL) on Dec 2020. All the browsers have aligned their efforts to disable/stop running Flash application for this date. VMware vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 are supported till Nov 2021 and both these versions are shipped with vSphere Web Client (Flash) with them.

There is a window of about 11 months where the Flash client might not work, if you upgrade your browser with the latest version.

Recommendation:

VMware’s recommended approach for customers are to upgrade their VMware vCenter server(s) to 6.7 Update 3 by Dec 2020 and use vSphere Web Client (HTML5) to manage the vSphere environment. They do not need to upgrade the ESXi hosts to 6.7 for this purpose of addressing the Flash Client supportability issue. Refer to the VMware Compability Matrices for supported versions of VMware products with vCenter Server 6.7 Update 3. Depending on their current deployment/configuration, customers might have to upgrade some of the other VMware and/or 3rd party products before they upgrade their vCenter server to 6.7 Update 3.

The alternative approach which is not recommended by VMware is to stop the auto-update on the browsers and use the vSphere Web Client (Flash) on the browser which still supports Flash. VMware will continue to support vSphere Web Client (Flash) on a version of the browser on which Adobe Flash runs. vSphere Web Client browser support matrix will be updated to reflect the browser version on which it will be supported.

For More information please refer to: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78589

Important:

Now before you rush and upgrade your infrastructure to a supported 6.7 Version. Please refer to the below VMSA Vulnerability as well as upgrading your environment to 6.7 will bring you under this issue as well: 

So if you are planning to upgrade, please upgrade your infrastructure to VMware vCenter Server 6.7 Update 3f

For more information please refer to the vCenter Server 6.7U3F Release Notes

Related Information:

Adobe Flash Roadmap
Google Blog on Chrome
Firefox
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge