Add a Host to the vSphere Auto Deploy Inventory

You can view the hosts that do not match any vSphere Auto Deploy rule and manually add a host to the vSphere Auto Deploy inventory.

To add a host to the current vSphere Auto Deploy inventory of deployed hosts, you can create a new rule or edit an existing rule to include a host that is not deployed with vSphere Auto Deploy and associate it with a specific image profile, host profile and location. Alternatively, you can manually add a host to the inventory by assigning it an image profile, host profile, and location.

Prerequisites

• Prepare your system and install the Auto Deploy Server. For more information, see Prepare Your System for vSphere Auto Deploy in the vSphere Web Client.
• To assign an image profile to the host, add the software depot that you need to the inventory. See Add a Software Depot or Import a Software Depot.

Procedure

1. Navigate to Home > Auto Deploy.
   By default, only the administrator role has privileges to use the vSphere Auto Deploy service.
2. On the Discovered Hosts tab, select one or more hosts that you want to provision with an image profile, host profile, and location.
3. Select Add to Inventory.
   Alternatively, click Remove to dismiss the selected hosts from the Discovered Hosts tab.
   The Add to Inventory wizard appears.
4. On the Select image profile page of the wizard, use the drop-down menu to select a software depot and choose an image profile from the list.
   If you want to bypass the acceptance level verification for the image profile, select the Skip image profile signature check check box.
5. On the Select host profile page of the wizard, select a host profile from the list.
6. On the Select host profile page of the wizard, use the Filter to search the host profiles list or select the Do not include a host profile check box to continue without adding a host profile.
7. On the Select host location page of the wizard, select a data center, folder, or cluster as host location for the hosts that match the rule.
8. On the Select script bundle page of the wizard, select a script bundle from the list.
9. On the Ready to complete page, review the selected host associations.

What to do next

• Edit a vSphere Auto Deploy rule. See Edit an Image Profile.
• Clone a vSphere Auto Deploy rule. See Clone a Deploy Rule
• View the image profile, host profile, added script bundles, and location associations of a host. See View Host Associations.
• Remediate non-compliant hosts. See Remediate a Non-compliant Host.