Permission denied while connecting to a remote server

Hello everyone,

I'm using VMware Workstation 9 to connect to a remote server. Since VMware Workstation 8, it's a feature I greatly apprciate to connect to my virtual machines on my vSphere clusters.

However something is not right when you connect to a vSphere cluster with a user other than your vCenter administrator account. For example, I've created a user 'test' with administrative permission on a single virtual machine and can connect using vSphere Client but Workstation give me a "Permission to perform this operation was denied" error message.

Steps to reproduce the problem:

1. Create a user and assign administrative permission on a single virtual machine.
2. Connect to vCenter using vSphere Client with that user and confirm you have acces to that single virtual machine and that single machine only.
3. Connect to vCenter using Workstation with that user and see error "Permission to perform this operation was denied".

We have a production SnS for our vSphere environnement, we did open a Service Request but it was closed since the problem wasn't with vSphere or vCenter but with Workstation. We didn't purchase SnS for Workstation since we can't purchase SnS for VMware Workstation for less than 10 seats.

If we add Administrator or even Read-only roles to that user on the datacenter level and propagate it down, our test user will be able to connect from Workstation but that defeat the purpose for having acces to a limit number of virtual machines from Workstation.

• Can anyone replicate the issue?
• Can someone with access to the bug database check if it's a know issue or bug (work as designed or not)?

Thanks, -Guillaume