It is of prime importance to make sure that every ESXi host in a cluster is configured identically to achieve operational efficiency at the cluster level. There is a lot of configuration that would go into an ESXi host after it is deployed. These include the general/advanced settings, storage and networking configuration, licensing, and so on. With the number of ESXi hosts that can be part of a cluster or vCenter increasing with every release of vSphere, the amount of work to be done manually will also increase.

With vSphere 4.1, VMware introduced a method to extract the configuration from an ESXi host and form a configuration template often referred to as a blueprint or golden image. Such a configuration template is called a vSphere Host Profile. Host Profiles help an administrator to maintain compliance of configuration standards on a set of ESXi hosts. They can also be used to make a configuration change to be pushed to all the hosts attached to the template, without the need...