Going to discuss two separate topics in this post. First up is the vCenter permissions, these can be broken up into roles, users, and groups. Roles contain the list of privileges you can apply to a user or group, for example the role Network Administrators may allow the user to add, edit, or remove network information from VMs and edit distributed switches. The users can be created locally on the vCenter or if you integrate with Active Directory they could already be on the vCenter ready to go. The group is where you can assign groups of users, say you create individual user accounts and assign a select few of those user to the administrator group. Then from there you can assign a specific user or entire group to a role. This is done from the global permissions tab under the administration tab, you assign the role to the user or group there. You can also assign a role directly to an object, such as a VM, cluster, resource pool, etc, to a user or group. Say for example you have one VM you want a read only user to have full admin control over, you simply right click it and add the administrator permission to that user for that specific object and now that user will have admin access to edit all settings on only that VM. Next up is host profiles, I will touch up on those a little bit more in my next post. Host profiles allow you to save the configuration of a host and use that as a reference to apply to other hosts or clusters. Say for example you have one host and you configure syslog, NTP, AD server, and you want to save this configuration and apply it to other hosts and clusters without having to edit all of these settings per host. What you can do is create a host profile on this “reference host” and assign that host profile to the cluster or other specific hosts, from there the vCenter will automatically configure those hosts to match your reference host exactly, simplifying configuration. As I mentioned before I will continue my research on host profiles and attempt to provide a more detailed explanation in my post tomorrow. As always feel free to leave comments!