Create an Amazon EVS host - Amazon Elastic VMware Service

Create an Amazon EVS host

After an Amazon EVS environment deploys, you can add hosts to increase capacity and workload resiliency. Amazon EVS supports 4-16 hosts per environment. This action can only be used after the Amazon EVS environment is deployed.

Note

You must assign and commission the host within the SDDC Manager user interface.

To create an Amazon EVS host

Follow these steps to create an Amazon EVS host.

Warning

Amazon EVS hosts use a custom vendor add-on to provide important host functionality. When you add a host to your environment, it will have the latest available version of the Amazon EVS custom add-on. If your environment uses hosts with an older add-on version, adding host to your vSphere cluster will cause cluster image remediation to fail. For steps to troubleshoot this issue, see Troubleshoot add host failure due to incompatible cluster image.

Warning

If you have updated your ESX version after the Amazon EVS environment deployment, SDDC manager may fail during VCF host validation in the commission hosts step. For steps to troubleshoot this issue, see SDDC Manager fails VCF host validation during host commissioning.

Note

Ensure that your Amazon EVS host count per EVS environment quota is correctly set to ensure successfully host creation. Host creation fails if this quota value is less than the number of hosts that you are attempting to provision within a single Amazon EVS environment. To raise the quota, you can request a quota increase. For more information, see Amazon EVS service quotas.

Note

If you don’t specify an ESX version when adding hosts to your environment, Amazon EVS automatically uses the default ESX version associated with your environment’s VCF version. See VCF versions and EC2 instance types provided by Amazon EVS for more information.

Important

When adding an ESX host, select an ESX version that matches your target vSphere cluster. If the same version is unavailable, deploy an older version and upgrade using vSphere Lifecycle Manager. For more information, see SDDC Manager fails VCF host validation during host commissioning. Upgrades may require host reboots and increase the time it takes to commission the host.

A host with an ESX version newer than your vSphere cluster image ESX version cannot be downgraded. You will need to delete the host and recreate it with the correct ESX version.

Example
Amazon EVS console and SDDC Managuer UI

  1. Go to the Amazon EVS console.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Environment.

  3. Select the environment where you want to create the host.

  4. Select the Hosts tab.

  5. Choose Create host.

  6. Specify host details and choose Create host.

  7. To verify completion, check that the Host state has changed to Created.

  8. Go to SDDC Manager.

  9. Commission the new host in SDDC Manager. For more information, see Commission Hosts in the VMware Cloud Foundation documentation.

  10. Add the new host to the cluster, using SDDC Manager. For more information, see How to Add an ESX Host to Your vSphere Cluster by Using the Quickstart Workflow in the vSphere documentation.

AWS CLI and SDDC Manager UI

  1. Open a new terminal session.

  2. Create a new host. See example command below for reference.

    aws evs create-environment-host \
    --environment-id "env-abcde12345" \
    --host '{ \
        "hostName": "esxi-host-05", \
        "keyName": "your-ec2-keypair-name", \
        "instanceType": "i4i.metal",\
        "esxVersion": "ESXi-8.0U3g-24859861"\
    }'

  3. Go to SDDC Manager.

  4. Commission the new host in SDDC Manager. For more information, see Commission Hosts in the VMware Cloud Foundation documentation.

  5. Add the new host to the cluster, using SDDC Manager. For more information, see How to Add an ESX Host to Your vSphere Cluster by Using the Quickstart Workflow in the vSphere documentation.