Implement and Maintain Host Profiles

February 6, 2013 Objective 5 Operational Maintenance No comments

What are Host Profiles?

The host profiles feature creates a profile that encapsulates the host configuration and helps to manage the host configuration, especially in environments where an administrator manages more than one host or cluster in vCenter Server.
Host profiles eliminates per-host, manual, or UI-based host configuration and maintains configuration consistency and correctness across the datacenter by using host profile policies. These policies capture the blueprint of a known, validated reference host configuration and use this to configure networking, storage, security, and other settings on multiple hosts or clusters. You can then check a host or cluster against a profile’s configuration for any deviations.

Workflow
You perform host profiles tasks in a certain workflow order. You must have an existing vSphere installation with at least one properly configured host.

Set up and configure the host that will be used as the reference host. A reference host is the host from which the profile is created.
Create a profile using the designated reference host.
Attach a host or cluster to the profile.
Check the host’s compliance to the reference host’s profile. If all hosts are compliant with the reference host, they are correctly configured.
Apply the host profile of the reference host to other hosts or clusters of hosts.

Instructions for creating Host Profiles

Go to the Home Page in vClient and click on Host Profiles
Click Create a New Profile

Create a new Profile or import a Profile

Put a name and description in

Click Next and Review the Summary > Finish

Once it has created the profile click Edit to edit the profile

Attach a profile to one or more Hosts/Cluster

Click Attach Host/Cluster
Select Hosts or Cluster

Check Compliance

When you have first added a host or cluster to your profile, it will look like this

Highlight a host or your cluster and click Check Compliance
I have made a deliberate error so it shows Non Compliant as per below

The Compliance Failure shows as per below screenprint

After rectifying the DNS errors and turning off SSH in the Security Profile on my reference host, I now need to right click on my Host Profile and select Update Profile
Then Enter Maintenance Mode on my Non-Compliant Host
And re-apply the host profile
Check Compliance (Hurrah!)

Exit Maintenance Mode
it should now look like the below

Create Sub-Profiles

On the left side of the Profile Editor, you can expand the host profile. Each host profile is composed of several Sub-Profiles that are designated by functional group to represent configuration instances. Sub-Profiles are for e.g.

Storage configuration
Networking configuration
Date and time configuration
Firewall configuration
Security Configuration

Each Sub-Profile contains many policies and compliance checks that describe the configuration that is relevant to the profile. Each policy consists of one or more options that contains one or more parameters

Open the Profile Editor for the profile you wish to edit (as outlined above)
On the left side of the Profile Editor, expand a sub-profile until you reach the policy you want to edit (noted with a “folder” icon)
Right click the policy and select “Add Profile