I'm posting this to hopefully save someone else the time and trouble I went through figuring this out.
We've got a brand-new Horizon View 5.2 setup, using vCSA as our vCenter, two Windows Server 2008R2 VMs as our Composer and Connection servers, and ESXi 5.1U1 hosts. Our pool is set up to reclaim disk space. After getting everything set up and working, we were getting errors in the View Administrator event log like this:
Failed to perform space reclamation on machine desktop1 in Pool mypool
We'd get these for every desktop, about once per hour.
On the View Connection server, the log errors in C:\ProgramData\VMware\VDM\logs\log-yyyy-mm-dd.txt look like this:
WARN (08CC-09B8) <PendingOperation-vm-912> [ServiceConnection25] Problem while performing VC operation: 'Permission to perform this operation was denied.' [com.vmware.vim25.NoPermission] ERROR (08CC-09B8) <PendingOperation-vm-912> [ServiceConnection25] Permission to perform this operation was denied. ERROR (08CC-09B8) <PendingOperation-vm-912> [PendingOperation] Error reclaiming space for VM /View/vm/view-pool-storage/mypool/desktop1 :com.vmware.vdi.vcsupport25.VmException25: Permission to perform this operation was denied.
After elevating permissions for the vCenter user used by the Connection Server on one desktop, I discovered that this user was missing a permission that is not outlined anywhere in the View documentation. In addition to all the permissions outlined in the docs (and translated to vSphere 5.1 in this excellent blog post - Terence Luk: Configuring vCenter role permissions for VMware vSphere 5.1 and VMware Horizon View 5.2 (View Manager and V…), the user also need this permission:
Virtual Machine -> Interaction -> Perform wipe or shrink operations
Once this permission is added, the desktops are happily reclaiming space and the errors are gone.