By far, my favorite fling is the ESXi Embedded Host Client. I really like the potential of this one and what it could mean for the future of VMware Update Manager. VUM is really just about the last thing that has me holding on to the vSphere client. With the ability to upgrade VMware tools and hardware and install ESXi  updates with the embedded host client, it seems that VMware has the potential to have all of its products managed by a web browser. Here’s a walkthrough of the quick and simple install.

First, upload the host client vib to a datastore using the web client

Start a SSH session to your ESXi host and the command:
esxcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/<datastore name>/<vib name.vib>

If it is successful you should see these results

Now browse to https:// <FQDN or IP address of host> /ui and enter in your root username and password

You should now see the interface for the host client

The Embedded host client has some nice features that have been built upon. In the 4.0 release here are some of the new features released:

New Updates in 4.0

Host

• Ability to change host acceptance level
• Ability to edit lock down exception users
• Ability to edit system swap settings

VM

• VM list has been optimized for performance, reducing data download by a factor of 5.
• Ability to edit VM advance options
• Ability to edit VM video adapter settings
• Add a PCI pass through device (unable to remove device though)
• SRIOV support for Network card devices
• Ability to change browser console keyboard layout (Japanese and German are the currently supported layouts)
• Cmd+a or Ctrl+a to select all VMs in list
• Soft-power off and reset if Tools is installed is now supported

General

• New Tools and links menu under Help
• Update mechanism can now take a URL or data store path to an metadata zipfile, allowing to update ESXi itself
• Localization and internationalization (French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Korean
• Ability to disable session timeout
• A huge number of bugfixes and minor improvements

These are in addition of some other notable features like the ability to clear a partitions and the ability to resize a datastore that already has a partition table. Really nice!!