The host element defines the specifics of the machine on which the CAS crawls are deployed. The host configuration is the same for crawls that write output to a Record Store instance and crawls that write to a record output file.
The hostName is set automatically when you run the deployment script. You therefore do not typically have to change the hostname unless you decide to start using a CAS Server on another machine.
To specify a CAS Server host:
<!— ######################################################################## # CAS servers/hosts --> <host id="CASHost" hostName="WEB009.mycompany.com" port="8888" />