Creating Block Hosts

Prerequisites

A subsystem (block-enabled view). See Creating a Block Storage Subsystem (View).
The host must be configured to interact with NVMe devices.
For Linux hosts, install the NVMe CLI tool:
```
sudo yum install nvme-cli
```
VMWare hosts have built-in NVMe/TCP support starting from vSphere 7.0 Update 3.
The NVMe Qualified Name (NQN) of each host.
To get the NQN of a Linux host, use this command:
```
cat /etc/nvme/hostnqn
```
To get the NQN of a VMWare host, use this command:
```
esxcli nvme info get
```

Navigate to the Hosts tab in the Element Store page.
Note
The Volumes and Hosts tabs appear only when there is at least one block-enabled view configured on the cluster.
Click Create Host.
Select either Single host to create one host or Multiple hosts to create multiple hosts.

If you selected Single host, complete these fields:

Name	Enter a host name. The host name must be unique on the tenant.
Connectivity type	This field is read-only, since only connectivity over TCP is supported in the current version.
NQN	Enter the host's NVMe Qualified Name (NQN), a unique identifier used to identify the host in NVMe operations.

If you selected Multiple hosts, complete these fields:

Name	Enter a name string for all of the hosts. An incremental digit will be added to each host name.
Connectivity type	This field is read-only, since only connectivity over TCP is supported in the current version.
NQN	Enter a base value for the NVMe Qualified Names (NQNs) of the hosts. This is an identifier used to identify each host in NVMe operations. An incremental digit (and optionally a common suffix set by the Suffix field, will be added to each host's NQN. Each host will need to be configured to use the same NQN to connect to the subsystem.
Suffix	Optionally enter a suffix to be appended to the name for each host.
Count	Enter the number of hosts you want to create.

In the Tags section, optionally add tags in the format key=value. These are applied to the host(s) and can be used to add identifying information for organizational purposes. Volumes can also be tagged. You can also add tags later by modifying each host.
To enter a tag, enter the key string in the Key field and the value string in the Value field, and then click Add Tag. Repeat as needed to add more tags.
Click Create.
Host creation begins and can be monitored in the Activities page.
The hosts are listed in the Hosts tab.
If you created multiple hosts, a progress dialog appears showing you the progress of host creation. You can either leave it open, in which case it will show the progress and let you know when the task is done, or click one of the other options provided:
- Go to activities, to monitor the process from the Activities page.
- Go to Hosts Table, to go back to the Hosts tab. The new hosts will be added to the table as they are created.
If you leave it open, when the task is done, another option, Map To Hosts Table, appears. You can click this option to configure mappings of volumes to the hosts.