When managing clusters with many ESXi hosts, administrators usually want these hosts to have the same configuration. Such consistency ensures the required redundancy and lets administrators automate many processes such as DRS or DPM.

As hosts have many settings, it can be a difficult task to keep their configuration consistent across the cluster. vCenter offers a feature called host profiles. Profiles store the host's configuration and can be used to configure new hosts and validate the configuration for the existing hosts.