since upgrading to vcenter 5.1, we’ve encountered an unusual issue with the web client. a vcenter user that has access to inventory and is able to access objects just fine from the vsphere windows client receives the error “client is not authenticated to vmware inventory service” when logging into the vsphere web client.

i figured maybe this was because this user didn’t have access to the root of the hierarchy, which would be the vcenter server object. i tried giving that user read-only permissions to the vcenter server object, but that did not help.

the only way i could get the web client to function for this user was by adding them as a local administrator in windows on the vcenter server. i imagine this has to be a bug…but at this point in time i could not find any vmware KB articles on the subject.

update 12/6/2013:
after upgrading to vcenter 5.1 update 1c (also all hosts on 5.1) this issue has been resolved.

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