On-premise Data Centers have to be sized for future growth, usually 3 – 5 years of growth. Usually the original architecture is either under-scoped or wayyyyy over-scoped by the time you get to 3 – 5 years time. But…. growth does need to be taken into account, procuring new hardware can take 2 + months to turn up to the data center, then the work of racking/stacking, plumbing in and deploying the new hardware can take place. Once again this can take time.

A key benefit of public cloud is, you pay for what you use, and scale up (or down) as you grow. VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is one of the many services you can consume within AWS, and you can choose how you want to consume it.

Inside the data center of Amazon Web Services

You get to choose how you consume VMC, as an on-demand service or as a reserved instance / subscription service, or mix and match consumption models to meet your application and business requirements.

When customers consume VMC they generally deploy the required resources for their applications, not for 3 – 5 years time. But when it comes to adding on resources, how long does it take and whats the process? Glad you asked!

How long does it take to add additional resources (Compute + Storage) – around 10 -15 Minutes.

This saves customers from having to size for growth, and it allows customers to align with public cloud consumption models of paying and deploying resources when you need them.

There is three key ways you can add resources to VMC:

  1. Let VMC automate it for you, using Elastic DRS (EDRS)
  2. Use tools like vRealize Automation or Terraform to deploy infrastructure as code
  3. Add a host in the cloud console

I am going to show you how to add a host via the console.

  1. The first step is to log in to the VMC Console at https://vmc.vmware.com
  2. Click on the SDDC that you want to add additional hosts to and then click Summary
  3. Select where to add the hosts.
    • If the SDDC has only one cluster, select Actions > Add Hosts from the SDDC card. (see below screenshot)
    • If the SDDC has more than one cluster, select Actions > Add Hosts from the card for the cluster where you want to add the hosts.

4. Select the number of hosts to add, and click ADD HOSTS

You are done, well done!

The add host process will compete the following:

  • Add the required host
  • Networking is all automatically configured
  • CPU, Memory and Storage Resources are automatically increased

Because this is cloud, you can scale up and scale down, to remove a host is just as easy, the how-to guide can be found here