This blogpost concerns being able to open IE on Windows Server 2012 R2 desktop and being able to login and use the vSphere Web Client. It’s NOT about INSTALLING the vSphere Web Client TO a Windows Server 2012.
If you try to open the vSphere Web Client on a cleanly installed Windows Server 2012 R2 Desktop you will find that Adobe Flash will not be available. Click the link to Adobe Flash will lead you down a rabbit hole of trying reading an article from them about Windows 8.1
There’s a VMware KB article about this here – kb.vmware.com/kb/2054049
To fix the issue you need enable the feature called “Desktop Experience”. That can be done via Server Manager (although I couldn’t see the option myself), or using PowerShell. It turns out that in R2 the location of the “Desktop Experience” has moved in Server Manager Roles & Features to a category called “User Interfaces & Infrastructure”
From Server Manager
From PowerShell:
import-module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature -name Desktop-Experience,qWave ` -IncludeAllSubFeature -IncludeManagementTools
Incidentally, although this does make the vSphere Web Client work, it does generate warning at logon prompt indicating that IE is not supported…
