Creating a Cluster with Enabled vSphere Lifecycle Manager

Currently, you can use only the vSphere Web Services APIs to create a cluster in your virtual environment. Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can specify the desired state during the cluster creation.

You must use the vSphere Web Services APIs to create a cluster. Call the Folder.CreateClusterEx method and pass as arguments the name for the new cluster and a ClusterConfigSpecEx data object. In the data object, among other properties, you can specify the desired state for the cluster. The desiredSoftwareSpec property in the ComputeResourceConfigSpec data object contains the desired software specification for the cluster. This property is available for applications using the vSphere Web Services APIs 7.0 and later. You can create a DesiredSoftwareSpec data object and specify the base image that must be applied on the cluster with the baseImageSpec property. Optionally, you can specify a vendor add-on to be added to the software specification with the vendorAddOnSpec property.