Managing ESXi Hosts in VMware Cloud Foundation

To add ESXi hosts to the SDDC Manager inventory, you must first create a network pool or expand the default network pool created during bring-up. If you want to isolate VMkernel traffic (management, vSAN, vMotion, or overlay) across multiple physical NICs (pNICs) on the hosts, you must authorize the additional pNICS before adding the hosts to VMware Cloud Foundation.

For information on network pools, see Network Pool Management.

During the commissioning process, the hosts are associated with a network pool and added to the SDDC Manager inventory. Newly commissioned hosts appear in the SDDC Manager inventory with a host state of UNASSIGNED, and can now be added to either the management domain or a VI workload domain, depending on their associated network pool. When a host is added to a workload domain, an IP address from the network pool's IP inclusion range is assigned to it.

See VMware Configuration Maximums for information about the maximum number of hosts per SDDC Manager instance.