With Host Profiles, administrators can better manage host configurations especially for larger environments with many ESX or ESXi servers. Host profiles eliminate manual per-host configuration and help to maintain consistency across your environment.

Host Profiles are supported only in vSphere 4 or later.

Host Profiles is a feature that needs to be licensed. It comes with the Enterprise Plus license. Therefore, if there are any issues with it, checking if you are using the correct license is going to be the first troubleshooting step.

If a host has been deployed with vSphere Auto Deploy, its configuration is captured in Host Profile. The profile in most cases is sufficient to store the whole configuration. In certain cases however, when a host that was provisioned with Auto Deploy boots, the user will be prompted for input. In this case, administrators can use the answer file.