Release Notes

26 Dell Virtual Storage Manager: Installation Considerations and Local Data Protection | 2079-BP-V-VSM
4 Role-based access controls
Dell VSM is a powerful tool that enables vSphere administrators to complete storage management and data protection
tasks from within vCenter. However, in many vSphere environments, there will be multiple vSphere users with varying
degrees of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities. VSM 4.0 introduces over 50 additional privileges enabling the
creation of very granular vCenter roles that reflect the skills and business needs of the individual user.
From a high level, the vCenter predefined roles range from limited read-only access to full administrative access, with a
number of additional role possibilities. VSM builds on the defined roles and helps create other roles that meet the
business access requirements.
Some businesses clearly define teams and roles (for example, a network team, server team, storage team, and
application team). Because hypervisors cross over several core data center roles, more-granular roles were needed.
The additional privileges that VSM provides allows vSphere administrators to create a vCenter storage administrator
role that enables members of the storage team to add PS Series groups, deploy additional volumes, and present those
volumes as VMFS formatted datastores to the vSphere environment. At the same time, the storage team members'
ability to interact with VMs can be limited since that is a task for the hypervisor team which has not been given this
permission.
Even in businesses that do not have distinct teams, there are tasks that require distinct access permissions. For
example, incorrectly recovering a VM from a snapshot can have undesired consequences if a Rollback Restore is
performed instead of a Restore VM from Snapshot. The role privileges that VSM provides permit that level of
granularity. It also allows roles that are limited from all snapshot and replication data protection privileges.
For details on the more than 50 vCenter privileges that VSM enables in vSphere, see the VSM Installation and User’s
Guide on eqlsupport.dell.com (login required).