Product : VMware, vSphere/6.0, Remote Office Branch Office Advanced
Feature : Browser Based Mgmt, General, Management
Content Owner:  Roman Macek
Summary
Yes - Enhanced Web Client (with enhanced SSO), No BDE
Details
No vSphere Big Data Extensions (BDE) supported with this edition!

vSphere 5 introduced a web based (Adobe Flex based) vSphere client interface which makes the access to vCenter platform-independent.
VMware positioned the web client as the core management interface since vSphere 5.1 - largely matching and in many cases superseding functionality of the legacy client (many new features will only be accessible through the web client). If you e.g. want to create one of the new large 62TB vmdks, you can only do that from the web client.

vSphere 5.5. maintains both the legacy and web client (confirming continued use of the legacy client) and has further enhanced the capabilities of the web client itself, as well as the Single Sign On that enables central authentication.

vSphere 5.5 web client enhancements:
- full client support for Mac OS X
- Drag and drop (e.g. drag and drop vm on to hosts)
- new filters and dynamically updated object lists based on those filters
- new recent-items navigation aid

The initial vCenter Single Sign On (SSO) has been improved in 5.5:
- Simplified deployment (single installation model for customers of all sizes)
- Enhanced Microsoft Active Directory integration - The addition of native Active Directory support enables cross-domain authentication with one- and two-way trusts common in multi-domain environments.
- Architecture - Built from the ground up, this architecture removes the requirement of a database and now delivers a multi-master authentication solution with built-in replication and support for multiple tenants.

vSphere Big Data Extensions (BDE) is a new addition in vSphere 5.5 for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Editions. BDE is available as a plug-in for the vSphere Web Client.
BDE is a tool that enables administrators to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on vSphere. It simplifies the provisioning of the infrastructure and software services required for multi-node Hadoop clusters.
It performs the following functions on the virtual Hadoop clusters it manages:
- Creates, deletes, starts, stops and resizes clusters
- Controls resource usage of Hadoop clusters
- Specifies physical server topology information
- Manages the Hadoop distributions available to BDE users
- Automatically scales clusters based on available resources and in response to other workloads on the vSphere cluster