5.5

Table Of Contents
Table 61. Summary of Administrative Requests (Continued)
Operation Request Request Body Response
Retrieve a list of tasks
owned by organization id.
GET API-URL/tasksList/id None
TasksList
Retrieve a task. GET API-URL/task/id None
Task
Cancel a task. POST API-
URL/task/id/action/cancel
None 204 No Content
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>
vCloud API Programming Guide
152 VMware, Inc.