VMware Host Profiles – Detailed View -Part 1

What is VMware Host Profiles ?

In Larger IT virtualized environment, it is very difficult to keep track of configuration changes and also maintain consistent configuration across all ESX host.Configuring multiple host manually will prone to human mistakes and also a time consuming process.

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

VMware Host Profiles

Click on Create Profile to create Host Profile.

VMware Host Profiles


There are 2 options

1. Create Profile from existing host (configured reference host)
2.Import profile

VMware Host Profiles

Select the Host which you want it as golden image for your environment

VMware Host Profiles


Specify the Name and description for that profile

VMware Host Profiles


Click on finish to create the host Profile.

VMware Host Profiles


Host profile called “Golden Profile” is created.

VMware Host Profiles


Right Click on the created profile to edit or view the settings captured as part of this host profile.

VMware Host Profiles


We can the see the list of configuration settings for the below items:

VMware Host Profiles

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.