Administrator Credentials and Privileges

An administrator's privileges are scoped by the organization to which the administrator authenticates.

The VMware Cloud Director API defines two levels of administrative privilege:

• Organization administrators, who have administrative privileges in a specific organization.
• System administrators, who have superuser privileges throughout the system. System administrators are members of the System organization, and can create, read, update, and delete all objects in a cloud. They have organization administrator rights in all organizations in a cloud, and can operate directly on vSphere resources to create and modify provider VDCs, external networks, network pools, and similar system-level objects.

Some administrative operations, and all vSphere platform operations, are restricted to the system administrator. Before you attempt these operations, log in to the System organization with the user name and password of the system administrator account that was created when VMware Cloud Director was installed, or the user name and password of any member of the System organization. For example, a system administrator whose user name was defined as administrator would log in as administrator@System.

The System Organization

The System organization is created automatically when VMware Cloud Director is installed. Unlike the organizations represented by Org and AdminOrg objects, the System organization cannot contain catalogs, VDCs, groups, or users who are not system administrators.

The System organization is initially configured with one member, a local user defined as part of the VMware Cloud Director setup process. Like all organizations, the System organization is created with implicit support for the VMware Cloud Director integrated identity provider. A system administrator can reconfigure the System organization to use any of the other identity providers supported by VMware Cloud Director.

The System Organization

When a system administrator logs in to the VMware Cloud Director API, the OrgList in the returned Session element contains a link to the System organization.

<OrgList ... >
   ...
   <Org
      type="application/vnd.vmware.admin.systemOrganization+xml" 
      name="System" 
      href="https://vcloud.example.com/api/admin/org/123"/>
   ...
</OrgList>