Creating a cluster and adding ESXi hosts

Clusters are the basis for everything that is great within vSphere. Clusters are the level where individual resources become pooled and shared for virtual machines. Clusters allow all higher-level functionalities within vSphere, such as an automatic restart after a hardware failure and dynamic balancing of workloads. Individual ESXi hosts and clusters can exist at the same level under a datacenter object in vSphere.

In this recipe, you will walk through the steps necessary to set up your first cluster of servers in vCenter. You will be reusing the same four ESXi hosts that you configured in the Creating a configuration script to set all properties uniformly recipe from Chapter 1, Configuring the Basic Settings of an ESXi Host with PowerCLI.

Getting ready

This chapter assumes that your vCenter has the datacenter object defined and that you have individual ESXi hosts connected or managed by vCenter. In this example, you will call the Primary datacenter...