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Quick Tip - Listing vSphere Global Permissions using PowerShell

04.07.2025 by William Lam // 10 Comments

Parsing complex HTML is definitely challenging, even with PowerShell. I had hoped to use the free tier of ChatGPT and their latest 4o model to help build a PowerShell function for HTML parsing, but I kept running into system limits and the AI often misunderstood what I was asking for.

I finally gave in and purchased the $20 subscription so that I could expand on my 2017 blog post about automating vSphere Global Permissions and add support for listing global permissions, which came at a request from a recent user.

It turns out calling the private vSphere Global Permissions API via the vSphere MOB to show all current vSphere Global Permissions is extremely difficult due to the complex HTML that is rendered by the vSphere MOB. In fact, it took 25 iterations before I finally arrived at the solution using ChatGPT's 4o model. In several of the iterations, it ended up going backwards in progress, so that was pretty annoying!

Not sure if this is the new fancy "vibe coding" trend that I had experienced ... šŸ˜…

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, vSphere Tags // global permission, powershell

Quick Tip - How to disable viewing of vSphere Tags?

01.26.2022 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I just answered an interesting inquiry that came from our field on how to prevent users in vCenter Server from viewing vSphere Tags? The use case here is that the data contained in the vSphere Tags may not be something administrators want general users to be able to see, especially if they contain sensitive information, which hopefully folks are not using to store things like credentials or secrets.

If you navigate to the vSphere Roles, you will see a number of vSphere Tagging privileges, but there is nothing that covers the ability to remove read only access.


One very important thing to understand about the authorization of vSphere Tags is that it is NOT controlled by standard vSphere Permissions that you would assign in the vSphere Inventory but that it is controlled via vSphere Global Permissions, which are outside of the vSphere Inventory, which also includes vSphere Content Library and other vCenter Servers.

If you wish to disable the ability to view vSphere Tags for a VM while still maintaining basic read only view for VM, you need to ensure there is not a read only role assignment for your user under Global Permissions. You can check by navigating to vSphere UI under Administrator->Global Permissions. If the user that you are logging in with does not have a Read Only Global Permission, they will not see any of the vSphere Tagging information nor vSphere Content Library, which is another side affect.

Categories // vSphere Tags // global permission, tag

Monitoring vSphere account password & permission changesĀ 

11.01.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

If it is not clear by now, I REALLY love the power of vSphere Events and all the use cases it can enable, especially when used with our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to enable easy Event-Driven Automation.

Over the past month or so, I have noticed a series of questions from our field and customers across a number of topics pertaining to vSphere accounts including vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) users. My response to each of these questions all point back to a leveraging specific vSphere Events and I thought I share some of use cases in which vSphere Events can help

  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was changed?
  • How much time left (expiry) before the vSphere SSO user password must be changed?
  • Audit of all password changes for an vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • Who recently updated the password for a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*)?
  • When was the last time a vSphere SSO user (e.g. *protected email*) password was reseted?
  • Who recently added new permission to a vSphere user?
  • Who recently removed a permission from a vSphere user?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role with additional permissions?
  • Who recently updated vSphere Role and removed permissions?

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // global permission, password, permission, VMware Event Broker Appliance

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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