How to add a new host to a vSAN cluster

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This blog post, I call blog posts like these “quick & dirty posts”, will show you today how to add an ESXi host to your vSAN cluster. You may need additional compute power, and/or storage capacity. Or you want to implement another storage policy to leverage storage efficiency and more failures to tolerate (RAID 5 / RAID 6 erasure coding). Maybe you want to create a stretched cluster, which needs an even number of vSAN nodes on each side plus a vSAN witness. So many reasons to add another vSAN node.

But let’s dive into this topic now.

How to add a new host to a vSAN cluster?

In my vSAN cluster, based on the Express Storage Architecture (ESA), I’ve got six hosts currently. I want to add another host to the cluster because of the computing and storage power. How to do this?

Right-click your cluster and choose “Add Hosts…”. So far, nothing special.

Add a host to the cluster (as you’re used to it)

You will see the “Add new and existing hosts to your cluster” assistant, which you know already, and where you can add more than just one host. But for now, we’re