If you have not yet upgraded from vCenter 5.5 to 6, you may want to give it a shot. vCenter 6 is much faster and introduces a lot of nice UI improvements. One of my favorites is the relatively minor change that when you delete a VM, it displays the VM name in the dialog instead of “this object”. In any case, it’s pretty swanky and I think you’ll like it.
However, there is one extremely noticeable, but (in my opinion) poorly documented change, in the permissions model for non-Administrator users and groups. In 5.x, you could assign user rights to a folder or VM and the user would be granted the proper level of access to the folder members or the individual VM. If this was your folder layout…
…and you wanted to grant Virtual Machine Power User access to the VM autodeploy-test, you could grant that permission to a user or group on the folder or VM here and the user could manipulate their VM just fine:
After upgrading to 6.0, the same user would not have permission to access the folder or VM. They might simply see Empty Inventory when looking at the VM and Templates view. To remedy this, you need to grant non-propagating permissions at the intermediate Datacenter tier (you do NOT need to grant permissions to the vCenter object). These permissions can be as limited as read-only in most cases, but as they are not propagating, you can use the same permission level (e.g. Virtual Machine Power User). The new permission is highlighted in red:
If you have multiple intermediate folders, you’ll need to assign the non-propagating permissions at every level. You’ll need to do the same on the Hosts and Clusters, Datastores, and Network views as well. In an additional wrinkle, Network view permissions for Distributed vSwitches cannot be assigned on the DVS, they need to be assigned on a folder containing the DVS and optionally on an individual Distributed PortGroup.
I have heard rumors that this new “feature” may be fixed soon, but until then, these changes are required for non-Administrator users to maintain their permission levels.
rnelson0 
THANK YOU! I spent almost two hours on this silliness and was beginning to suspect a non-propagating perm was a possible fix and then struck gold with your post. I concur it’s simply not in the docs that I’ve seen (and I looked hard), and being a three-fold VCP didn’t matter a whit. Thanks again.