You add hosts to your cluster by launching the Add hosts wizard, part of the Cluster quickstart workflow.

Note: After you configure the cluster by using Quickstart, if you modify any cluster networking settings outside of Quickstart, you cannot use the Quickstart workflow to add and configure new hosts to the cluster.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that hosts have the same ESXi version and patch level.
  • Obtain the user name and password of the root user account for the host.
  • Verify that hosts do not have a manual vSAN or networking configuration.
  • Verify that you have the proper privileges. Different sets of privileges apply when you add multiple hosts to a cluster and a single host to a cluster or a data center. For more information, see Required Privileges for Common Tasks in the vSphere Security documentation.

Procedure

  1. Click Add in the Add hosts card.
  2. On the Add hosts page, under the New hosts tab, add hosts that are not part of the vCenter Server inventory by populating the IP Address and credentials text boxes for those hosts.
  3. (Optional) Select the Use the same credentials for all hosts option to reuse the credentials for all added hosts.
    You enable this option after populating the first line of credentials.
  4. On the Add hosts page, click the Existing hosts tab, and add hosts that are managed by the vCenter Server and are in the same data center as your cluster.
  5. Click Next.
    The Host summary page lists all hosts that will be added to the cluster and related warnings.
    Note: If a host cannot be validated automatically by the system, you are prompted to manually validate its certificate and accept its thumbprint in the Security Alert pop-up.
  6. Click Next.
  7. On the Ready to complete page, review the added hosts and click Finish.
    The number of added hosts and the health check validation, performed by the vSAN Health service, are summarized in the Add hosts card.
  8. (Optional) Click Re-validate to retrigger the validation of the hosts.
    Note: If an error occurs, it is visible in the Recent Tasks tab only.

Results

All hosts are placed in maintenance mode and added to your cluster.

What to do next

Configure your cluster default settings through the Quickstart workflow.