When you’re dealing with some legacy software, such as the vSphere web client version 5.x and you’re accessing it from a Windows Server OS, You may need to install Flash Player on Windows Server 2016 for Internet Explorer. If you run a search through Google, Bing, or Qwant, you may find various entries suggesting:
- to enable Remote Desktop Host role
- to enable the Desktop experience role
- Windows 10 only solution
Fortunately, there’s no need for that. You just to have to install the proper package. Unfortunately it is not displayed as a stand-alone feature in the Server Manager wizard. You’ll have to revert to a bit a Powershell (for laziness) and dism to install package online. Here is the code:
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$flash = gci (Join-Path $Env:WinDir 'Servicing\Packages') -Filter 'Adobe-Flash-For-Windows-Package*.mum' dism /online /add-package /packagepath:$($flash.FullName) |
In the code you may note the use of the Fullname property. Don’t forget that the objects returned by Get-ChildItem are FileInfo and that the default string of those objects are the filename not the full path name. Therefore, if you were to execute this command:
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dism /online /add-package /packagepath:$flash |
you’d likely to get:
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Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.14393.0 Image Version: 10.0.14393.0 An error occurred trying to open - Adobe-Flash-For-Windows-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.14393.0.mum Error: 0x80070003 An error occurred trying to open - C:\Windows\system32\Adobe-Flash-For-Windows-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.14393.0.mum Error: 0x80070003 Error: 3 An error occurred trying to open - C:\Windows\system32\Adobe-Flash-For-Windows-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.14393.0.mum Error: 0x80070003 |
The correct execution path is:
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Version: 10.0.14393.0 Image Version: 10.0.14393.0 Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Adobe-Flash-For-Windows-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.14393.0 [==========================100.0%==========================] The operation completed successfully. |
Once you’ve done that, you just need to close your Internet Explorer Window and re-open the site with the embedded flash contents.
Please note that once enabled, you may still have issues with Flash and the vSphere client, but that’s linked to Flash, not to the handling of Flash Player by Windows and Internet Explorer anymore.