5.1

Table Of Contents
Administrator Credentials and Privileges
An administrator's privileges are scoped by the organization to which the administrator authenticates.
The vCloud API defines two levels of administrative privilege:
n
Organization administrators, who have administrative privileges in a specific organization.
n
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 vCloud Director was installed. For
example, if the system administrator’s user name and password was defined as administrator and Pa55w0rd,
the system administrator login credentials are the MIME Base64 encoding of the string
administrator@System:Pa55w0rd.
NOTE When logging in using a SAML identity provider, the system administrator must use the vSphere SSO
Service as the identity provider. See “Create a Login Session Using a SAML Identity Provider,” on page 46.
The System Organization
The System organization is created automatically when vCloud 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.
Example: The System Organization
When a system administrator logs in to the REST 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>
Organization Administration
System administrators create organizations and organization administrators, and establish certain
organization policies. Organization administrators populate their organization with users and groups, assign
roles, and can update most organization policies and properties.
A cloud can contain one or more organizations. Each organization is a unit of administration for a collection
of users, groups, and computing resources. Users authenticate at the organization level, supplying credentials
established when the user was created or imported. User credentials are authenticated by the organization's
identity provider, which can be either the integrated identity provider included in vCloud Director or an
external SAML-based identity provider.
vCloud API Programming Guide
132 VMware, Inc.