A cluster is a group of hosts. When a host is added to a cluster, the resources of the host become part of the resources of the cluster. The cluster manages the resources of all hosts within it. Clusters enable, vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and the VMware vSAN features.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that you have sufficient permissions to create a cluster object.
  • Verify that a data center, or folder within a data center, exists in the inventory.

Procedure

  1. Browse to a data center in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
  2. Right-click the data center and select New Cluster.
  3. Enter a name for the cluster.
  4. Select DRS and vSphere HA cluster features.
    Option Description
    To use DRS with this cluster
    1. Select the DRS Turn ON check box.
    2. Select an automation level and a migration threshold.
    To use HA with this cluster
    1. Select the vSphere HA Turn ON check box.
    2. Select whether to enable host monitoring and admission control.
    3. If admission control is enabled, specify a policy.
    4. Select a VM Monitoring option.
    5. Specify the virtual machine monitoring sensitivity.
  5. Select an Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) setting.
    EVC ensures that all hosts in a cluster present the same CPU feature set to virtual machines, even if the actual CPUs on the hosts differ. This prevents migrations with vMotion from failing due to incompatible CPUs.
  6. Select the vSAN cluster feature.
    1. Select the vSAN Turn ON check box.
    2. Specify whether to add disks automatically or manually to the vSAN cluster.
  7. Click OK.

Results

The cluster is added to the inventory

What to do next

Add hosts to the cluster.

For information about configuring vSphere HA, see vSphere Availability, and for information about configuring vSphere DRS see vSphere Resource Management. For information about vSAN, see Administering VMware vSAN .