An administrator needs to reference several hosts in an Affinity Policy as part of a multi-VM blueprint. What is the best way to accomplish this task?

Host–VM affinity/anti-affinity policies are defined at the Project level in Prism Central. The recommended procedure is to 1) create a Category that is attached to every host that must participate, and 2) in the Project that the Calm blueprint will use, add a Placement (Affinity) Policy that references that host Category. When the blueprint is launched under the Project, Prism Central automatically applies the policy and places the VMs on the hosts contained in the referenced Category. Categories – not legacy Tags – are the supported construct for grouping multiple hosts in PC 6.x, and policies are attached to Projects, not to individual blueprints.

B. A blueprint can add categories only to the VMs it creates; it cannot assign categories to hosts or build host policies.
C. Tags are deprecated in Prism Central 5.11+ and cannot be used in placement policies.
D. Projects’ placement policies do not recognize Tags; only Categories are valid identifiers.

1. Nutanix Prism Central Admin Guide v6.1, “Projects → Placement Policies,” p. 115-118 – explains creating VM-Host Affinity policies using Categories inside a Project.

2. Nutanix Prism Central Admin Guide v6.1, “Working with Categories,” p. 63-66 – states Categories replace Tags for grouping hosts and VMs in policies.

3. Nutanix Calm Administration & Operations Guide v6.1, “Blueprint Execution Context,” p. 39 – notes that blueprint placement is governed by the Project’s policies, not by constructs inside the blueprint.