Adding ESXi Hosts to your vCenter Appliance

Once you have your vSphere vCenter 5.5 appliance up and running, configured with any desired Datacenters and Clusters, it is time to add ESXi hosts.

1. Log into your vCenter web portal <IP>:9443 with an administrator account.
2. Locate the datacenter or cluster you wish to add your host into. Right click on it and select add host.
3. Now you will need to fill in the name and location of the host, plus the local account for access.
4. Verify that the host was connected to and if any VMs exist they are all listed. 
5. Assign your license
6. Use lockdown if desired. Lockdown prevents direct access to the host. 
7. Review all of the settings and click Finish to initiate.

The process should take a few minutes to complete. You can keep track in the Recent Tasks section of the progress. You will also see any new VMs, networks, etc. appear in your infrastructure as they are added. VMs running on the host should not see any disruption during this process. You are just taking management of the host over, it should keep running with any assigned resources.