Hi Jeremy,
When creating a manual pool there is no explicit customization that occurs inside the VM. The VM is simply added to the View UI in that pool.
What you should see though is a reconfiguration task kick off as soon as you add the VM. This adds some information to the VMX file of the VM so the Agent can read it and connect to your Connection Server.
Two common reasons we don't see this complete successfully are:
a) The vCenter Administrator account you've provided in the View Admin UI doesn't have sufficient permissions
To fix this simply assign a user that has full admin permissions at the top level of vCenter.
b) The vCenter Server is showing as red in the dashboard and you haven't accepted the certificate exception.
I can see from your screenshot that you only have a single item showing as red in the top left overview. I'm assuming that's your Connection Server so this may not be the problem.
If you could grab the VMX file from the VM you're trying to work with and drop it here I can take a look. You can also look inside the file yourself if you like. You're looking for an attribute named "machine.id". There should be a long string in there with various comma separated values.
One last question, how much RAM do you have assigned to the Connection Server VM?
-Mike