I have encountered the following issue lately trying to power on a virtual machine with a limited permission user using the vSphere Web Client :
The “Power on virtual machine” operation failed for the entity with the following error message.
Virtual machine cannot be found.
This happened with a regular user with the appropriate role permission (Virtual Machine.Interaction.Power On) enabled.
It appeared that the vSphere Web Client also required permission at the folder level in “VMs and Templates”. Make sure that the role permission for the user(s) or group is properly set at both places (Datacenter, Cluster, Ressource Pool) in the “Hosts and Clusters” and also at the folder level in “VMs and Templates”.
The following behaviour have been encountered in vSphere v6.