Whitepaper: VMware Host Profiles - Technical Overview

VMware released a new technical whitepaper describing in more detail its Host Profiles found in vSphere 4.1. The introduction reads:

VMware vSphere 4.1 ("vSphere") is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments to enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services. vSphere 4.1 delivers new large-scale management features, such as VMware Host Profiles (Host Profiles), that enable efficient operational control and significantly reduce operating costs.

Host Profiles (available through VMware vCenter Server) enables you to establish standard configurations for VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and to automate compliance to these configurations, simplifying operational management of large-scale environments and reducing errors caused by misconfigurations. This paper provides a technical overview of Host Profiles and describes how you can use them to automate host configuration and to monitor for configuration compliance.

The paper contains information around host configuration management, how host profiles work and how best to use them, advanced profile editing and customization, as well as PowerCLI cmdlets for VMware Host Profiles.

You can download and read this technical whitepaper, here.