Host Profiles

I love the new host profiles utility in vSphere 4.

Host profiles allow you to build a golden ESX configuration, create a baseline against that configuration, and have it applied to new ESX servers that get put into the cluster. You can have a bunch of different baselines/configurations depending upon your need.

Once the golden image is finalized, apply the configuration to your other hosts to ensure uniformity. In 3.5 and older, you would have to go into each host and modify firewall rules, set NTP settings, create vswitches (with exact case and spelling) which could be tedious, and prone to errors. Linux heavy shops would be able to script the change management, but really, now you don't have to.

The only issue I've run into is modify that configuration after the fact. However you can create a new baseline to replace the previous one. I'm sure they'll fix this up in a dot release.

Cheers,

Chris