adobe flash is going away is your vmware environment and it organization ready for it

Adobe Flash is going away, is your VMware environment and IT Organization ready for it?

Hopefully this news should not come as a surprise to anyone but at the end of this year (December 31, 2020), Adobe and all mainstream web browsers will remove Flash functionality preventing users from interacting with any Flash-based web applications. This will also impact usage of VMware products that still uses Flash such as older versions of vSphere with the vSphere Flash Web Client or vCloud Director with their Flash-based Tenant UI as an example.

The large majority of VMware customers have already migrated off to newer versions of VMware products that no longer rely on Flash and this announcement will be a no-op for them. However, the reality is that not every customer has been able to meet this deadline for one reason or another will still have VMware products running in their Production environment that uses Flash even after the official end of life.

For these customers, it is really important to understand what are some of the implications and considerations to be aware of leading up to end of the year.

Option 1: 

Starting with Adobe Flash Player June 2020 update, a set of Enterprise Enablement features were added to help Enterprises manage the Flash EOL. Users can update the mms.cfg configuration file which is based on the operating system and the web browser that you are using allowing all/or a specific set of URLs to still access the Flash site by using the AllowListUrlPattern parameter. For more details, please refer to the Adobe Flash Player Admin Guide (Page 37).

Here is an example of what the mms.cfg could look like:

EOLUninstallDisable=1 EnabledAllowList=1 AllowListPreview=1 AllowListUrlPattern=https://FQDN/

Where FQDN can be your vCenter Server, vCloud Director or any other hostname which is serving up Flash content. You do not have to specify the full path of the application URL for this to work.

Here is the location of the mms.cfg for the various operating system and browser combination. This was also recently added to VMware KB 78589 and definitely recommend subscribing to this KB for future additions and updates.

Google Chrome on Windows	%localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\System\mms.cfg
Edge Chromium on Windows	%localappdata%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\System\mms.cfg
32-bit Windows	%windir%System32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
64-bit Windows	%windir%\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
MacOS	/Library/Application Support/Macromedia
Google Chrome On MacOS	/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Pepper Data/Shockwave Flash/System

Option 2:

Leverage VMware Automation tools such as PowerCLI, VMware SDKs/CLIs, etc. to perform specific tasks which require a Flash-based UI. Some customers have taken this approach to remove the need to have their admins or end users directly interact with a VMware product and provide an end-user portal for these common operations. Web Commander is just one example, where PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts can be executed from centralized portal and you can certainly build your own or leverage other VMware solutions like vRealize Orchestrator or vRealize Automation providing similiar functionality. This does require some level of development but for those who are already automating their infrastructure, this could be a nice short term workaround for the cases where you may need the Flash UI.