As documented in the official VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide for Host Commissioning:
“During the commissioning process, SDDC Manager regenerates a self-signed certificate for the host based on its FQDN to ensure secure communications and integration with the management domain.”
“Before commissioning, all partitions must be deleted from the host's disks to allow SDDC Manager to claim storage for vSAN or other use. Failure to remove partitions can cause the commissioning workflow to fail.”
“The host must be installed with a version of ESXi that is supported by the current release of VMware Cloud Foundation. Unsupported versions will cause the commissioning operation to fail.”
Why Not the Other Options?
B:While having multiple 10Gbps NICs is recommended, it is not a strict commissioning requirement for all host profiles.
D:Updating DNS is necessary, but the step of “adding the host directly to SDDC Manager using root credentials” is incomplete, as SDDC Manager itself performs the addition and validation steps.
E:Manually adding hosts to vCenter is not permitted; SDDC Manager must orchestrate the entire host onboarding process.
Summary:
The three required steps to commission a new host into the SDDC Manager inventory are:
A. Regenerate the self-signed certificate based on the FQDN,
C. Delete all disk partitions on HDD/SSD,
F. Ensure a supported version of ESXi is installed.
These steps are explicitly outlined in the VMware Cloud Foundation host commissioning documentation.
