Any way to allow vCenter users to see #SPBM policies without using global permissions?
No pol visible w/cluster level permissions #vmware— Aaron Patten (@Jedimt) January 18, 2017
I saw this question from Aaron yesterday while scrolling through my Twitter timeline and after answering it, I figure I write a quick blog post about it in case this comes up in the future.
There are two specific privileges around managing VM Storage Policies: Update and View as shown in the screenshot below. If you only want to allow users to be able to see all the available VM Storage Policies that have been defined, then you just need to create a new Role with only the "View" privilege.
Secondly, it is important to note that VM Storage Policies are defined and managed at a vCenter Server level. This means that when you assign the permission, it needs to be applied at the root vCenter Server level (you do not have to propagate it down wards if you do not wish to show the rest of the vSphere Inventory). Global permissions are not required, but if you have multiple vCenter Servers which are all part of the same SSO Domain, you may want to consider this if users are allowed to login to any one of the vCenter Servers.
Once you have assigned the permission to either the user or group, then you can have them login using either the vSphere Web Client or using the SBPM APIs and you will now be able to view all defined VM Storage Policies.
Thanks for the comment!