vSphere 5 and Web Client have introduced a new feature called Tagging. Tags are just labels containing metadata information, which can be attached to objects in the vSphere environment for categorization.

Tags can be attached to datastores, datastore clusters, VMs, and so on. Such categorization allows making objects in the environment searchable and sortable, which helps with management and scripting.

Tags can be grouped into categories that define which objects these tags can be applied to.

For example, administrators can categorize virtual machines by a guest OS, or datastores by their characteristics, such as storage speed, redundancy, and so on.

Tags are supported through Web Client and are not interchangeable with user-defined capabilities in vCenter Client, so we will use Web Client to tag objects in the following example.