Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Tags let you dei ne custom identii cation or information options for nearly every object type
within vCenter, including the following:
Clusters
◆
◆
Datacenters
Datastores
◆
Distributed Switches
◆
Folders
◆
◆
Hosts
Networks
◆
Resource pools
◆
vApp s
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◆
Virtual machines
Tags Flow Through into Other VMware Products
Custom tags within vCenter are used not just within this one product. VMware also exposes your
custom tags within its API and allows other VMware (or non-VMware) software to utilize this
metadata. One such use of this data lies within vCenter Operations Manager. While it is techni-
cally a separate product, it has deep integration with vSphere and vCenter. h e tags that are created
within the vSphere Web Client can also be used for creating monitored applications or groups of
VMs within vCenter Operations Manager.
After you create this tag, you can attach the tag to an object. After the tag is added, it appears
in the Tags section of the content area Summary tab. You can use the Assign Tag option in the
right-click menu to add tags to various objects, as shown in Figure 3.28.
With the tags clearly dei ned for various objects, you can then search based on that data.
Figure 3.29 shows a custom search for all objects whose tag contains the text
Production
,
Engineering
, and
Windows
.
Using tags to build metadata around your ESXi hosts, VMs, and other objects is quite power-
ful, and the integration with the vSphere Web Client's search functionality makes large invento-
ries much more manageable.
At this point, you have installed vCenter Server, added at least one ESXi host, and explored
some of vCenter Server's features for managing settings on ESXi hosts. Now we'll cover how to
manage some of the settings for vCenter Server itself.
