Afternoon, if you’re working in IT then unless you’ve been living under a rock or wrecked your internet this Christmas, you’re most likely aware that Flash reached its long overdue end of life on the 31st December 2020. However, unless you’ve been reading the fine print, you may not be aware that Adobe seem to have prepared for the end of Flash by implementing a kill-switch into their Flash Player, as their Flash Player will block Flash content from running, starting on the 12th January 2021! See Adobe’s full article here.

How would this affect me?

For starters, if you’re using any applications that require Flash, you have nearly run out of time to migrate them to another platform, so best get the coffee going…

Focusing on VMware this could cause you massive headaches with your day to day administration. VMware Horizon gained HTML5 support in the 7.x releases (7.8) but this was largely incremental in functionality so unless you’re up to date with patches (VMware state feature parity in 7.11) you’re likely to be missing key features preventing you effectively maintaining your VDI deployments. Equally with VMware vSphere, it was a while before the HTML5 client gained feature parity with the Flash client, so unless you’re up to date with your patching you won’t necessarily have all the features necessary to carry out your administration.

If you’re still using vCenter 6 after the end of life then you need to look into upgrading your vCenter immediately. Alternatively you could try your luck installing the VMware Fling for HTML5 on vCenter 6, but this fling hasn’t been updated in nearly a year and really isn’t intended for production.

But wait there’s more… So you may be thinking “I’m up to date, I don’t need to worry”, but also consider any plugins you may have in your vCenter that are Flash only or haven’t got feature parity between the Flex & HTML5 counterparts.

Time is fast running out now for ensuring you don’t require Flash within your environment anymore, it’s going to be worth taking some time to confirm you don’t need it, before you realise you do and Adobe hard locks you out.