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About Hosts
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server with CloudPlatform. There may be multiple vCenter servers per zone. Each vCenter server may
manage multiple VMware clusters.
3.5. About Hosts
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, or an ESXi server.
The host is the smallest organizational unit within a CloudPlatform deployment. Hosts are contained
within clusters, clusters are contained within pods, pods are contained within zones, and zones can be
contained within regions.
Hosts in a CloudPlatform deployment:
• Provide the CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources needed to host the virtual machines
• Interconnect using a high bandwidth TCP/IP network and connect to the Internet
• May reside in multiple data centers across different geographic locations
• May have different capacities (different CPU speeds, different amounts of RAM, etc.), although the
hosts within a cluster must all be homogeneous
Additional hosts can be added at any time to provide more capacity for guest VMs.
CloudPlatform automatically detects the amount of CPU and memory resources provided by the hosts.
Hosts are not visible to the end user. An end user cannot determine which host their guest has been
assigned to.
For a host to function in CloudPlatform, you must do the following:
• Install hypervisor software on the host
• Assign an IP address to the host
• Ensure the host is connected to the CloudPlatform Management Server.
3.6. About Primary Storage
Primary storage is associated with a cluster or (in KVM and VMware) a zone, and it stores the disk
volumes for all the VMs running on hosts.
You can add multiple primary storage servers to a cluster or zone. At least one is required. It is
typically located close to the hosts for increased performance. CloudPlatform manages the allocation
of guest virtual disks to particular primary storage devices.
It is useful to set up zone-wide primary storage when you want to avoid extra data copy operations.
With cluster-based primary storage, data in the primary storage is directly available only to VMs
within that cluster. If a VM in a different cluster needs some of the data, it must be copied from one
cluster to another, using the zone's secondary storage as an intermediate step. This operation can be
unnecessarily time-consuming.
CloudPlatform is designed to work with all standards-compliant iSCSI and NFS servers that are
supported by the underlying hypervisor, including, for example: