How to configure ONTAP role-based access control for VSC for VMware vSphere

You must configure ONTAP role-based access control (RBAC) on the storage system if you want to use role-based access control with Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere (VSC). You can create one or more custom user accounts with limited access privileges with the ONTAP RBAC feature.

VSC and SRA can access storage systems at either the cluster level or the storage virtual machine (SVM) SVM level. If you are adding storage systems at the cluster level, then you must provide the credentials of the admin user to provide all of the required capabilities. If you are adding storage systems by directly adding SVM details, you must be aware that the vsadmin user does not have all of the required roles and capabilities to perform certain tasks.

VASA Provider can access storage systems only at the cluster level. If VASA Provider is required for a particular storage controller, then the storage system must be added to VSC at the cluster level even if you are using VSC or SRA.

To create a new user and to connect a cluster or an SVM to VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA, you should perform the following:

Create a cluster administrator or an SVM administrator role
Note: You can use one of the following to create these roles:
- ONTAP System Manager 9.7 or later
  Configuring user roles and privileges
- RBAC User Creator for ONTAP tool (if using ONTAP 9.6 or earlier)
  RBAC User Creator tool for VSC, VASA Provider and Storage Replication Adapter 7.0 for VMware vSphere
Create users with the role assigned and the appropriate application set using ONTAP
You require these storage system credentials to configure the storage systems for VSC. You can configure storage systems for VSC by entering the credentials in VSC. Each time you log in to a storage system with these credentials, you will have permissions to the VSC functions that you had set up in ONTAP while creating the credentials.
Add the storage system to VSC and provide the credentials of the user that you just created

VSC roles

VSC classifies the ONTAP privileges into the following set of VSC roles:

Discovery
Enables the discovery of all of the connected storage controllers
Create Storage
Enables the creation of volumes and logical unit number (LUNs)
Modify Storage
Enables the resizing and deduplication of storage systems
Destroy Storage
Enables the destruction of volumes and LUNs

VASA Provider roles

You can create only Policy Based Management at the cluster level. This role enables policy-based management of storage using storage capabilities profiles.

SRA roles

SRA classifies the ONTAP privileges into a SAN or NAS role at either the cluster level or the SVM level. This enables users to run SRM operations.

Note: You must refer to the NetApp knowledge base articles if you want to manually configure roles and privileges using ONTAP commands.

VSC performs an initial privilege validation of ONTAP RBAC roles when you add the cluster to VSC. If you have added a direct SVM storage IP, then VSC does not perform the initial validation. VSC checks and enforces the privileges later in the task workflow.