What is VMware Host Profiles ?
Host Profiles helps us to maintains consistent configuration across the datacenter by using Host Profiles policies and also eliminates Manual host configuration/ Host Profile Policies captures the blue print of well known configured ESX host in environment and it also acts a reference host to configure other hosts in environment. These policies capture the blueprint of a known, validated reference host configuration which is also called as “Golden Image”. The blue print contains the information about the networking, storage, security and other settings.
Use cases of Host Profiles:
Simplify Host configuration process across a large number of hosts by automating host configuration of multiple hosts in a same exact way and reduce deployment challenges by faster configuration time and also in more consistent way. We can use VMware Host profiles to monitor the host configuration deviations by running compliance check against all the hosts in our environment with reference to the golden profile for auditing purposes.
A host profile is composed of two parts:
• Configuration details – Contains policies that tells how a hosts in the environment should be configured with the specific configuration settings.
• Compliance details – Contains a set of checks to ensure that the host is configured as specified in the profile
How to Create Host Profiles:
Click on Host Profile icon from Home > Management > Host Profiles
Click on Create Profile to create Host Profile.
There are 2 options
1. Create Profile from existing host (configured reference host)
2.Import profile
Select the Host which you want it as golden image for your environment
Specify the Name and description for that profile
Click on finish to create the host Profile.
Host profile called “Golden Profile” is created.
Right Click on the created profile to edit or view the settings captured as part of this host profile.
We can the see the list of configuration settings for the below items:
Memory Reservation Configuration (Service console memory reservation)
Storage configuration (NFS)
Networking Configuration
Date and Time Configuration (NTP settings)
Firewall Configuration
Security Configuration
Service Configuration
Advanced configuration information
User configuration
User Group Configuration
Authentication Configuration (AD Domain)
We will see the detailed information about the above configuration settings in my next post on Host Profiles.