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

Prerequisites

  • Verify that you have sufficient permissions to create a cluster object.
  • Verify that a data center exists in the inventory.
  • If you want to use vSAN, it must be enabled before you configure vSphere HA.

Procedure

  1. Browse to a data center in the vSphere Client.
  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. Click OK.

Results

The cluster is added to the inventory.

What to do next

Add hosts and resource pools to the cluster.