In a VMware vSphere environment, you might want to give certain permissions to users or administrators, who are not a part of the vSphere administrator's team, to perform specific tasks. For example, you might want to give the administrators of a server the permission to power on and off the server. You don't want to give these administrators all of the privileges in your environment because then you will lose control over it. There are many privileges you can give to somebody, and you probably want to give only a few. If you assigned privileges to users directly, it would be hard to see who has which privileges.

VMware vSphere has a nice feature called roles. Roles are a collection of privileges that you will need to perform a certain task. You can create a role called Server administrator and assign the Power On and Power Off privileges to this role. Every time you want to give an administrator the rights to power on and off a server, you can assign the...