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I recently encountered the above error in VMware vLCM while working in a multi-site vCenter environment. The issue was initially identified by a site administrator who had full administrative rights over the datacenter object they managed.

The root cause of this issue lies in the site administrators restricted access. Although they had full permissions for their respective datacenter, they lacked global administrative privileges across the entire vCenter. For vLCM to function correctly, broader access rights are required.

After investigating the vCenter roles and permissions, I was able to identify the minimal privileges needed to resolve the issue without granting excessive access.

The solution:

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You are properly not going to use it anyway (after you have installed VMware Tools).

The big “WHY”? – because if you remove it – then you don’t have to worry about current and future vulnerabilities on the virtual USB controller (there have been a few).

Take a look at my colleague blogpost (To get some more details 🙂 ): VMware VMs and USB Controller – Virtual Allan (virtual-allan.com)

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You are not very likely to bump into Windows 2003 physical servers anymore – but nevertheless that just happened to me a week ago. The task was clear – this server needs to be virtualized into a vSphere 7 environment, running vSAN.
The problem with this task is that to convert (P2V) a 2003 server you need to install vCenter Converter 6.2 on it, since the latest release 6.3 simply doesn’t work on 2003 servers (It won’t install).
Next problem is that vCenter Converter 6.2 doesn’t work with vSAN 7 – only “traditional storage” can be used as target – but in this case there were no other storage than vSAN that could be used as target.
What to do? – read on…

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I’ve just seen this in the release notes for VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 Update 1b:

Removing a virtual machine folder from the inventory by using the vSphere Client might delete all virtual machines


In the vSphere Client, if you right-click on a folder and select Remove from Inventory from the drop-down menu, the action might delete all virtual machines in that folder from the disk and underlying datastore, and cause data loss.

This issue is resolved in this release.

I’ve just checked this in my lab on the 6.7 U1b release – when I delete a VMfolder with a VM inside – the VM gets removed from inventory but not deleted on the datastore!

If I delete a VMfolder containing a VM, in vCenter 6.5 the VM gets deleted in the datastore!

Be careful when deleting virtual machine folders!