vSphere 6.x: The beauty and ugliness of the Content Library – Part 2

In part 1 of this mini-series, I wrote about some technical problems that I had had with the Content Library and provided the workable solutions for them.

Here I am going to touch the security aspect of this technology. Fortunately, there are no complications with restricting the virtual machine provisioning. It is just not as straightforward, as I or some of the readers would expect.

Issue #3 – Preventing users from provisioning the virtual machine from the Content Library

Affected platform: vSphere 6.0 and 6.5, all versions.

In vCenter, permissions are assigned to objects in the object hierarchy called vSphere Inventory Hierarchy. The individual permissions are called privileges. They are combined into roles which then allocated to the users.

The Content Library has its own set of privileges under All Privileges > Content Library. They designed to manage different settings related to the configuration of the object. There is a predefined role in vSphere called Content Library Administrator. The primary purpose of it is to give a user privileges to monitor and manage a library and its contents.

However, if you would like to restrict the VM provisioning from the Content Library and look at the long list, there is no privilege which can help to achieve this task there.

After doing some testing and discussing this subject with VMware GSS, the only solution we were able to come up was removing all Content Library privileges from the role and assigning it to the users on the vCenter Server level. In this case, users won’t be able to get access to the items in the Content Library. I was a bit frustrated with this limitation and even contacted the engineering team at VMware directly about the issue.

Coincidentally, I was working on restricting the VM provisioning from other sources: vApps and OVA/OVF Templates. It was then I realised it was actually possible to implement the complete solution to my problem.

As you might know, the Content Library keeps the VM template objects in OVF format.

So I decided to play with the privileges that control deploying process from OVF templates. Surprisingly, it was a vApp import that helped me to achieve my goal. Happy days!

Resolution: Remove All Privileges > vApp > Import privilege from the user role, as described in VMware KB 2105932.