Previously I blogged about commissioning ESXi hosts in SDDC Manager on VCF 5.2. You can read about that here. Please review Broadcom TechDocs; Commission ESXI Hosts

With VCF 9.0 hosts are commissioned within their desired vCenter in vSphere under Global Inventory Lists & then click ‘Hosts’ under ‘Resources’

From here, let’s take a look at the different sections, for the first one you can see ‘Assigned’ hosts that are in use in the vCenter

Under ‘Unassigned’ it will show empty because there are no hosts in a commissioned and unassigned state.

Under Network Pools you will find the pool initially created during the VCF wizard, we have IPs available for vMotion & vSAN networks.

Going back to ‘Unassigned Hosts’, from here we can click ‘Commission Hosts’, review the host commission checklist, once completed, click ‘Proceed’

The Commission Host wizard appears and there are different ways of doing it, adding them manually or using the Bulk Import with a pre-populated JSON file. I already have my 3 physical SuperMicro E300 hosts, these are hosts I picked up about 5 years ago, you can read about my blog on those here. ESXi 9.0 has been installed and I’ve gone through the basic configurations pointed out in previous blogs and Broadcom TechDocs.

I will be importing these as vSAN ESA hosts, selecting Import, Browse to my JSON and click Upload.

Once the hosts appear, next step will be to ‘Confirm All Finger Prints‘ and click ‘Validate All‘

Alright, good start so far, everything verified, click ‘Next’ & ‘Commission’

Heading to VCF Operations for Tasks

While we can monitor the task in vSphere, we can also get more detailed task info from VCF Operations under Fleet Management >> Tasks >> you can see the task in progress and click on it to monitor steps and subtasks

Now that the commission has been completed, in vSphere we have some Unassigned Hosts

The next step would be to put those hosts to use.