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<section id="about-hosts">
<title>About Hosts</title>
<para>A host is a single computer. Hosts provide the computing resources that run guest virtual
machines. Each host has hypervisor software installed on it to manage the guest VMs. For
example, a host can be a Citrix XenServer server, a Linux KVM-enabled server, an ESXi server, or
a Windows Hyper-V server.</para>
<para>The host is the smallest organizational unit within a &PRODUCT; deployment. Hosts are contained within clusters, clusters are contained within pods, pods are contained within zones, and
zones can be contained within regions.</para>
<para>Hosts in a &PRODUCT; deployment:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Provide the CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources needed to host the virtual machines</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Interconnect using a high bandwidth TCP/IP network and connect to the Internet</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>May reside in multiple data centers across different geographic locations</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>May have different capacities (different CPU speeds, different amounts of RAM, etc.), although the hosts within a cluster must all be homogeneous</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Additional hosts can be added at any time to provide more capacity for guest VMs.</para>
<para>&PRODUCT; automatically detects the amount of CPU and memory resources provided by the hosts.</para>
<para>Hosts are not visible to the end user. An end user cannot determine which host their guest has been assigned to.</para>
<para>For a host to function in &PRODUCT;, you must do the following:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Install hypervisor software on the host</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Assign an IP address to the host</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Ensure the host is connected to the &PRODUCT; Management Server.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</section>