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Going with the flow
By farseeker | February 24, 2010
Several months ago I took a 2nd, part-time, after-hours job doing sysadmin work for a company that I have a close relationship with. A large part of their business infrastructure is a 10-blade Dell Bladecentre system. It’s a mean beast. 20 CPUs, over 40Gb of RAM, and is set up as a VMWare ESXi cluster, hosting about 30 heavilly-used virtual machines.
Managing this cluster means using the VMWare vSphere Client, which is fine. It’s a brilliant tool! Worth every penny. There’s just one thing that really, really, really bugs me, and after almost 6 months of using it every day, I’m still falling in the same trap.
Take a look at the following login screen for the vSphere client. Don’t linger, just take a glance. After all, it’s just a login screen:
Now, for someone who logs into dozens and dozens of things (apps/websites) every single day, a login screen is very standard. So what I see when I log in, is actually this:
Time to play spot the difference. Can’t be bothered? OK, here’s the big difference:
This difference is HUGELY important. Especially considering the vSphere domain is different to my local domain, so this option actually destroys my login. And it’s incredibly annoying, because:
1. The “Save my credentials” button goes on every single other login dialogue box I’ve ever used has been replaced by something that’s quite the opposite
2. After you’ve already typed your (in my case, very complicated) username and password
3. It deletes your username and password that you just typed in
And by the time I remember, it’s too late, I’ve already hit ENTER, and I have to wait 15 seconds for the login to fail just to be dumped back at the login prompt without any username or password.
What it SHOULD look like is:
This way, you’re doing things in a flow and order that makes sense, and nobody will ever wonder why vSphere wiped out their session credentials instead of saving them.
(just to be clear, not providing any option for saving your vSphere credentials is quite sensible. That’s not my issue here).
Topics: General, Software | No Comments »