A unique integral identifier assigned to each physical node in a LogScale cluster. Vhosts are short numeric identifiers used to track nodes across various operations including segment replication, ingest queue partition assignment, task distribution, and debug log analysis. Each LogScale node is assigned a vhost number (for example, 1, 2, or 3) that is associated with the node's UUID in global storage. Vhost assignment can be manual through environment variables like BOOTSTRAP_HOST_ID, or automatic within the range 1-10000. The vhost identifier remains stable as long as the node retains its cluster_membership.uuid file, but ephemeral nodes with wiped disks may receive new vhost assignments when rejoining the cluster.