Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.
Click Finish at the summary screen.
10.
Repeat this process for all the ESXi hosts you want to manage using this instance of
vCenter Server.
Figure 3.20
Licenses can be
assigned to an
ESXi host as they
are added to vCen-
ter Server or at a
later time.
Now compare the tabs in the content area in the middle of the vSphere Web Client for the
vCenter Server, datacenter, and host objects. You can see that the tabs presented to you look the
same, but if you select them, their subsections change depending on the object selected in the
inventory tree. This is yet another example of how vCenter Server's user interface is context sen-
sitive and changes the options available to the user depending on what is selected.
You can add hosts to vCenter Server and manage them as separate, individual entities, but
you might prefer to group these hosts together into a cluster, another key object in the vCenter
Server inventory. We'll describe clusters in the next section.
Creating a Cluster
We've made a few references to clusters here and there, and now it's time to take a closer look at
them. Clusters are administrative groupings of ESXi hosts. Once you have grouped hosts into
a cluster, you have the ability to enable some of vSphere's most useful features. vSphere High
Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vSphere Fault Tolerance
(FT) all work only with clusters. We'll describe these features in later chapters; Chapter 7,
“Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity,” discusses vSphere HA and vSphere FT,
while Chapter 12 discusses vSphere DRS.
Perform the following steps to create a cluster:
1.
Launch the vSphere Web Client, if it is not already running, and connect to a vCenter
Server instance.
2.
Right-click a datacenter object in Hosts And Clusters view.
3.
Select New Cluster. This opens the New Cluster Wizard.
