Host profiles eliminates per-host, manual, or UI-based host configuration and maintain configuration consistency using a reference configuration which can be applied or used to check compliance status.
To accommodate configuring VMware ESXi hosts deployed with Auto Deploy in vSphere 5, several significant improvements have been made to Host Profiles. Host Profiles have been extended to include additional configuration settings such as support for iSCSI, FCoE, storage multipathing, individual device settings and kernel module settings. In addition Host Profiles now enables creating a per-host answer file. The answer file is used to store host-specific attributes that are not shared with other hosts. This facilitates the automated deployment of hosts using Auto Deploy, because the host-specific settings can be applied using the answer file, and the remaining shared configuration can then be applied using the Host Profile.