A good way to think about vSphere Tags today is that they are similar to vSphere Folders but much more dynamic and search across all vSphere Objects.
If you currently rely on this capability of Custom Attributes, you will not be able to completely migrate over to using vSphere Tags.
This distinction of not being able to assign object-specific metadata is the key difference between vSphere Tags and Custom Attributes. An example would be a Tag called "Production" which can then be assigned to VM1 and VM2 for organizational purposes but you would not be able to assign a specific value for each of the VMs. A major distinction between Custom Attributes and vSphere Tags which will help answer our initial question is that vSphere Tags can not be used to store object-specific metadata, it is used for categorizing or logically organizing various objects together. vSphere Tags can be applied to all objects within the vSphere Inventory. VSphere Tags also provides a metadata capability, but it goes beyond just VMs and ESXi host. An example would be a Custom Attribute called "Application Owner" and for VM1 I have a value of "Duncan Epping" and for VM2 I have a value of "Alan Renouf". which are the only supported objects When using the vSphere API, you can apply Custom Attributes it across variety of vSphere Objects and for more details, please have a look at this post here. Once enabled for either a VM or an ESXi host, you will be able to assign an object-specific metadata "value" to these objects.
#VSPHERE CLIENT 5.5 DOCUMENTATION UPDATE#
UPDATE (11/16/16):vSphere 6.5 now allows you to fully view and manage Custom Attributes directly from the vSphere Web Client.Ĭustom Attributes allows you to specify custom "keys" associated with either a Virtual Machine or an ESXi host object using the vSphere C# Client. A common question that I see frequently asked by customers is whether Custom Attributes in vCenter Server can be completely replaced by vSphere Tags? Both Custom Attributes and vSphere Tags provide metadata capabilities, but there are some underlying differences between the two and depending on how you use Custom Attributes today, you may or may not be able to completely migrate over to using vSphere Tags, at least in the short term.