Host commissioning in VCF 5.1
VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1 is a VMware product that bundles essential SDDC building blocks to create a unified platform for deploying applications.
It uses automated workflows to scale out and scale up your Cloud Foundation infrastructure. This means that you can add or remove hosts quickly and easily, without having to do any manual configuration.
Benefits of Using Automation
There are many benefits to using automation to scale your private cloud. Some of the most important benefits include:
Reduced time and effort: Automating host commissioning can save you a lot of time and effort. You won't have to manually configure each host, which can be a very time-consuming process.
Improved accuracy: Automation can help to improve the accuracy of your host commissioning process. When you're doing things manually, it's easy to make mistakes. But with automation, you can be sure that your hosts are being configured correctly.
Increased scalability: Automation can help you scale your private cloud more quickly and easily. You can add or remove hosts as needed, without having to worry about the complexity of manual configuration.
How Host Commissioning Works
The host commissioning process in Cloud Foundation Manager automates the configuration of everything you need. It configures host-level compute, storage, and networking within minutes. This saves you a massive amount of time and repetitive manual effort.
Hosts can be added individually or in bulk. SDDC Manager also includes a toggle option to skip failed hosts during bulk host commissioning operations. Once the process is complete, these hosts can then be seen and consumed as available capacity within the Cloud Foundation inventory. Cloud Foundation pre-configures each of these hosts as standardized building blocks. They are configured with vSphere, enabled for NSX, and configured for storage.
Hosts can then be consumed and allocated in one of two ways:
They can be used as expansion capacity for an existing cluster.
They can be used as dedicated units of capacity which can be pooled into new clusters in what we call a workload domain.
VMware Cloud Foundation allows concurrent commission and decommissions of multiple ESXi into the Cloud Foundation Inventory, eliminating the need for sequential task execution.
Additional Resources
VCF Tech Zone - Host Commissioning Demo
Additional Notes
SDDC Manager contains automated workflows for host commissioning (scaling out) and host decommissioning.
Network Pools need to be provisioned in advance. It is important to size network pools for scale.
VCF 5.x allows up to 10 host commissioning/decommissioning workflows in parallel (up to a maximum of 40 hosts per workflow).
Administrators can add and remove hosts in up to 7 different clusters simultaneously.