When you spin up a brand new SDDC using VMware Cloud Foundation, minimum number of hosts that are needed in Management Domain and VI Domain are 4 & 3 respectively. You can scale up Management domain up to 8 hosts and VI domain to 64 hosts.

Before scaling up the workload domains, we need to commission the host first and add it to vCF inventory. To add new hosts to inventory, we need to create a new network pool or expand the default network pool created during bring-up.

Once network pool has been created, you can start commission of new hosts by navigating to SDDC-Manager > Hosts and click on “Commission Hosts” button

Once the host have been commissioned, it will appear under unassigned hosts with configuration status as Active.

Note: If a host is in error state because of issues encountered during host commission workflow, you need to de-commission host first and fix the issue and commission it back again. 

Note: Only hosts with configuration status Active can be added to workload domains.

To add host to a workload domain. navigate to Home > Inventory > Workload Domains and click on domain which you want to scale. Under summary page, locate storage portion and click on the cluster.

From Actions menu select Add Host

Select the host from the list and hit Next.

Select the license key for the host. 

Note: If the existing licenses have used completely during bringup/workload domain creation then you have to add a new license by going to Home > Licensing page.

Review your settings and hit finish to start the host add workflow.

Typically following tasks are triggered in host add workflow.

Once the workflow is completed, you will see the new host assigned to a workload domain under Host State column.

And that’s it for this post. Adding new hosts to an existing cluster have never been so easy 😉

I hope you find this post informational. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing