I have had an issue with my vSphere Web Client when powering on any VM:

The “Power on virtual machine” operation failed for the entity with the following error message.

Permission to perform this operation was denied

In the logs, I found the following:

inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vim.fault.NoPermission: Permission to perform this operation was denied.
[ERROR] http-9443-5 com.vmware.vsphere.client.vm.powerops.impl.VmPowerOpManager com.vmware.vim.binding.vim.fault.NoPermission:
object = [email protected],
privilegeId = System.Read
inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SecurityError:
inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vim.fault.NoPermission: Permission to perform this operation was denied.

The VM actually does power on, which is visible in the vSphere Web Client after a GUI refresh.

After some Googling and reaching out on Twitter, I learned that VMware has a Knowledgebase article on this: KB2018590. Thanks, Jehad Affoneh! Jehad is an UI Engineer Platform User Interface at VMware. He’s currently working on the vSphere Web Client. Check out his blog: mynameisjehad.com.

One last tidbit I want to share on the subject, from the KB-article:

VMware is aware of this issue and is working to resolve this in a future release.

There’s currently no solution and/or workaround available for this bug, which means we need to muster up the patience for this ‘future release’… Hold on to your hats, folks.