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.

Starting with vSphere 6.7, you can create and configure a cluster that is hyper-converged. The hyper-converged infrastructure collapses compute, storage, and networking on a single software layer that runs on industry standard x86 servers.

You create and configure a cluster by either using the vSphere Web Client or through the simplified Quickstart workflow in the vSphere Client. In the Cluster quickstart page, there are three cards for configuring your new cluster.
Table 1. The cards initiating wizards for renaming and configuring a new cluster.
Cluster Quickstart Workflow Description
1. Cluster basics Lists the services you have already enabled and allows editing the cluster's name.
2. Add hosts Adds new and already present in the inventory ESXi hosts. Once hosts are added, it shows the total number of the hosts present in the cluster and health check validation for those hosts. In the beginning, this card is empty.
3.Configure cluster Informs you what can be automatically configured, provides details on configuration mismatch, and reports cluster health results through the vSAN Health service even after the cluster is configured.

The Skip Quickstart button prompts you to continue configuring the cluster and its hosts manually. You click Continue to confirm exiting the simplified configuration workflow. Once dismissed, there is no option to restore the Cluster quickstart workflow for the current cluster.

Clusters enable vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and the VMware vSAN features.