@igreenfield found a fairly serious bug in this. the act of simply listing compute instances--which should be a read-only operation--is actually mutating configuration in vmware. and in some cases, doing it wrong. you may want try running a test suite with read-only operations against a vcenter user with read-only privs in vcenter. things start to fail that shouldn't and I think this should give a good start of where to go look. i don't think that listing VMs should require a read-write connection to vcenter. I know that VIJava doesn't require it.
the problem in question was related to NIC configuration. it was changing NIC adapter labels for no obvious reason. in most cases, it seemed that the change was a no-op. it put them back in a functionally identical state. but in certain cases, it did not and effectively brought the VM off the network. --- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/jclouds/jclouds-labs/pull/61#issuecomment-54719659
