There are three types of authorization levels in the vCenter Server Appliance.

Authorization Levels

Authorization Level

Description

operator

A user has read access to appliance configuration settings.

administrator

A user has read and write access to the appliance configuration settings, but cannot manage user accounts.

super administrator

A user has all the capabilities of the other roles, and has the additional capabilities of creating local user accounts and accessing the local Bash shell.

This model applies to the API and all other interfaces to the vCenter Server Appliance except when you use SSH and log in using a local account.