When your VMware Cloud Foundation(VCF) SDDC Manager Workload Domain is getting full, you need to add disks to your VCF through ESXi vSAN hosts. Most of the changes you need to do in your vCenter should be done through the SDDC Manager. Not the case when you need physically add extra disks to your ESXi vSAN hosts.

The following example is a nested VCF environment. Still, I will make the changes as this was a physical environment, and I need to add additional disks to our physical ESXi hosts.

Note: Is it also possible to extend the LCM Volume group on SDDC Manager when using nested ESXi hosts on your VCF. This case is to simulate only a physical environment. I will write another blog post on how to do that.

In this VFC, SDDC Manager Workload Domain was getting low on space on the primary workload(the only workload).

As we can see in the following images, the vSAN disk volume was 89% full.

So as we can check in the above images, I am lack space in my SDD Manager workload, so I need to add more space to it.

How to add more space

The solution is to add more disks to the vSAN ESXi hosts since SDDC Manager works on top of vSAN.

This is a process that is a normal process in the vSAN environment, but here we will use it for the SDDC Manager.

Note: I am adding one new SDD 120Gb on each vSAN ESXi host, but you can add one or more disks on each ESXi host. The process is the same.

1. Power off ESXi vSAN hosts(depending on your data and how many ESXi hosts you have in your Cluster, you can power off one or more ESXi hosts to perform this task. Always ensure that all that are migrated and all objects are accessible).

2. Add your physical disk to your ESXi host (in my case was a new 120Gb disk for each ESXi host).

3. After you add all your disks to the vSAN ESXi hosts, you can start the process on vSAN to claim unused disks.

As we can see in the next image, a new flash disk of 120Gb on each ESXi host has not been used.

4. Next, go to your vSAN Cluster, Configure, vSAN option, and Disk Management tab, select your disks, and Claim Unused Disks.

You will see the new space after adding the new disks to your vSAN Cluster volume.

Next, we go back to SDDC Manager and check the Workload Storage space.

It took a couple of minutes for the SDD Manager workload to refresh and see the new space, but after a couple of minutes, we can see that SDD Manager recognized the new space and added to the workload capacity.

That is it, and the process is straightforward to add more space to your VCF environment. With this easy process, you can add space to your Workload Domain capacity without the need to create a new Workload Domain.

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