What happened?

It came as a surprise to me that a few of my production vSphere and vCenter environments all started exhibiting issues with the vSphere web client.
I tried on every browser, both Windows and Mac, but kept getting this message:

Accompanied by a friendly reminder that the page couldn’t render:

As noted by VMware, this impacts all versions of the Web Client.
Additionally, there is no known resolution, but a few workarounds exist that are detailed below. 

  • Personally I chose to patch the pepflashplayer.dll for Windows Chrome.

  • you can find the download at the bottom of this article


It worked like a charm! I was back in the Web Client without even re-launching Chrome!


Symptoms

While logging in to the vSphere Web Client the flash plugin crashes with the following error:
Shockwave Flash has crashed.

Cause

This is a known issue with Adobe Shockwave Flash version 27.0.0.170, and affects all versions of the vSphere Web Client.
For more information see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=774862

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution.

To workaround this issue, use one of these options:

Alternatively, the HTML5 Client and vSphere Client (legacy) are available for most operations, dependent on vSphere version and feature availability.

Additional Information

Community forums have identified a workaround of replacing the pepflashplayer.dll file with an older version as well.
Caution: This has not been verified by Adobe. fp_27.0.0.159 is not the latest version, the latest Flash version is 27.0.0.170.
All versions previous to 27.0.0.170 are impacted with the Critical vulnerability CVE-2017-11292. See, https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsb17-32.html.
Windows Workaround for FireFox:
  1. Click Start > run, type appwiz.cpl and click Run.
  2. Uninstall Adobe Flash Player 27 NPAPI Version 27.0.0.170.
  3. Download https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_27.0.0.159_archive.zip.
  4. Extract the fp_27.0.0.159_archive.zip\27_0_r0_159\flashplayer27_0r0_159_win.msi.
  5. Close FireFox.
  6. Run the extracted flashplayer27_0r0_159_win.msi.
  7. Click Start run, type services.msc and click Run.
  8. Disable Adobe Flash Player Update Service.
  9. Open the vSphere Web Client in FireFox.
Windows Workaround for Chrome:
  1. Download the attached 2151945_pepflashplayer.7z. [Link at bottom of post]
  2. Extract the pepflashplayer.dll to the Desktop.
  3. Open C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash\27.0.0.170\ in File Explorer.
  4. Rename pepflashplayer.dll to pepflashplayer.old.
  5. Copy the pepflashplayer.dll extracted earlier from the desktop to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash\27.0.0.170\
  6. Open the vSphere Web Client in Chrome.
Mac OS X workaround for Firefox:
  1. Uninstall the current Adobe Flash Player. For more information, see https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-mac-os.html.
  2. Download the installer for Adobe Flash Player 27.0.0.159, available at https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_27.0.0.159_archive.zip.
  3. Extract the flashplayer27_0r0_159_mac.dmg from fp_27.0.0.159_archive.zip\27_0_r0_159\.
  4. Install Adobe Flash Player using flashplayer27_0r0_159_mac.dmg.
  5. Disable automatic updates for Adobe Flash Player.

Download:

 


1 Comment

troyt · October 27, 2017 at 11:41 am

I chose to patch the pepflashplayer.dll for Windows Chrome. Worked GREAT Thank you

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