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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> |