vDS

Migration of a distributed switch (vDS) to a new vCenter (PowerCLI edition)

lenzker

### UPDATE: I received some posts / comments that my approaced way does NOT work when using LACP. I haven’t had the time to get deeper into that topic, but please be aware of that fact.

Reviewing Google analytics for my old blog on vxpertise.net showed that my article a few years ago is still kind of famous.

It explains how the distributed switch import/export feature can be used to migrate existing ESXi to a new vCenter. I extended the information explained in this blog post with a few lines of PowerCLI code that makes the whole process a lot of easier/faster/less error-prone.

vDS_Migration_title

This requirements is raising up more and more in environments of people I deal with. Especially the awesome vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) convinces people to create a new vCenter from scratch.

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Get ready for NSX phase 0: Migrate from a vSphere Standard to a distributed switch: manual and auto

lenzker

The distributed switch (vDS) is a really nice piece of software within the vSphere environment. It offers a variety of very useful features (NIOC, Health Check, Central management, LACP, LBT, Netflow, and so many (features with fancy abbreviations) more). Especially if you want to move to NSX the distributed switch is mandatory. Since analytics showed me that views about my vDS blogposts are increasing it seems that there is a demand for the vDS within our virtualized environments (it’s still an enterprise+ only feature)

Migrating from a vSphere standard switch to a distributed switch is not that complicated at all if you plan it properly. Over the years I collected a lot of (troubleshooting) experiences with the vDS. Anyway I want you to learn from my mistakes to do (not-so-daily) tasks right from the beginning.

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