Grant VM Power Controls w/o vCenter Access

[OsburnM]

Greetings all--  I'm sure this is an age old question but I'm curious what folks are doing nowadays with it.

Given the size of our environment, we have a strict no-vcenter-access policy to everyone but our VM server team.  If we let every app owners/teams have vCenter access, it'd be insane.  That said, I'm constantly asked by the app teams to provide even basic console & power controls to bounce a VM w/o having to get a hold of the server teams in the event RDP is no-longer working.

Anyone know of a good way of providing this access w/o granting them the ability to log into vCenter?

Thanks,

[daphnissov]

You really can't unless you use something like vRealize Automation. In most cases, though, you can achieve this through folder-level segregation of VMs and then applying a specific role with only those actions to that folder.

[OsburnM]

Yeah I know sadly.  Even on a good day though, that'd still result in at-least a couple hundred user connections at any given time.  😕

I knew vRA had the ability which is why I was hoping someone has come up with some utility that provides a similar feature.

[daphnissov]

That "utility" would not be a trivial piece of functionality to duplicate what vRA does. The whole system of entitlements and then proxying connections based on a service account is no small task.