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Quick Tip - Listing all vSphere Privilege Definitions

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By design, the vSphere platform (includes vCenter Server and ESXi) is highly extensible and additional vSphere Events and Privileges can added by 2nd and 3rd party solutions. Similiar to vSphere Events, where you can query your specific vCenter Server (or ESXI hosts) to list all vSphere Event definitions, you can also do the same for vSphere Privileges.

Using PowerCLI, we can use the Get-VIPrivilege cmdlet to help list out the vSphere Privilege Groups and the specific granular vSphere Privileges that exists within deployment.

Here is an example of listing all the different vSphere Privilege Groups that have been defined, either out of the box and/or by 2nd or 3rd party solution:

Get-VIPrivilege -PrivilegeGroup | select id,Description | Sort-Object -Property Id


As of vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3c, there are currently 111 out of the box vSphere Privilege Groups, you may have more or less depending on your version and the number of 2nd/3rd party integrations.

Here is an example of listing all the vSphere Privilege definitions that have been defined, either out of the box and/or by 2nd or 3rd party solution:

Get-VIPrivilege -PrivilegeItem | select id,Description | Sort-Object -Property Id


As of vCenter Server 8.0 Update 3c, there are currently 473 out of the box vSphere Privileges, you may have more or less depending on your version and the number of 2nd/3rd party integrations.

Additionally, you may also find these other vSphere Authorization blog posts useful:

Minimum vSphere privileges to install or remove patch from ESXi

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I recently got a question from our field inquiring about the minimum vSphere privileges that would be required to either install or remove a patch (VIB/Component) from an ESXi host. The customer was interested in using PowerCLI and specifically the ESXLI interface to automate the installation and removal of a VIB and wanted to create a custom vSphere Role with the minimum privileges, which can be done with vCenter Server or even a standalone ESXi host (properly licensed).

Since I was familiar with the underlying ESXi patch API that is used for these operations, a nice benefit of the vSphere API Reference is that it also lists the specific vSphere Privileges that is required for a given operation and in this case, it is just Host.Config.Patch privilege.

However, when the customer attempted to create a custom vSphere Role with just this privilege and perform the installation operation, they still received an error as shown in the screenshot below, which was a bit cryptic but they had assumed it was still permissions related as full administrative account had worked:

OperationStopped: Response status code does not indicate success: 500 (Internal Server Error)


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Exploring the new vSphere Privilege Recorder in vSphere 8.0 Update 1

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Determining the minimum vSphere privileges that is required to perform a given vSphere operation (UI/API) has been a huge customer challenge to say the least. Strategies have included guessing along with trial and error by creating a custom vSphere Role and slowly removing privileges until you have identified the minimum required privileges. If you are familiar with the vSphere API and know exactly which API methods and properties are consumed, then you can use the vSphere API Reference since every method and property includes the specific privilege required in the documentation, but this method is pretty tedious and time consuming.

If only we had a way to record all the vSphere privilege that was used for a specific set of operation(s) in vCenter Server ... 🤔

Apparently I missed the initial news, but this was actually one of the new features that was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 1 called the vSphere Privilege Recorder! 😆

UPDATE (07/25/24) - Looks like the PowerCLI team has productized this capability with a new cmdlet introduced in PowerCLI 13.3 called Get-VIPrivilegeReport

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