Ok last night I took our Lab Manager 4 cluster down and switched over to using the host spaning networking. Here is the process I used...

• In LM switch to Global Org

• In LM System>Settings>LDAP> Detach LDAP

• In LM Resources>hosts> undeploy all vm's on every host

• In VC remove nic's you use for guest vm's and your lab manager network from virtual switches freeing them up for use in a new vNetwork distributed switch. Take care not to completely disconnect any switches that have your LM or VC vm on them.

• In VC network inventory create a new vNetwork Distributed Switch to your datacenter object. Add the nics you freed up to the new dvswitch.

• In VC migrate you management vm's to the new dvswitch and then move the nic's they where using to the dvswitch. This is optional and really depends if your management vm's run in the same cluster as your lab manager vm's.

• In LM Manage>Resources>Host Spaning networks> click enable host spanning and then add your new dvswitch to the transport network list.

• In LM Manage>Resources>Hosts> enable host spaning on each host

• in LM Manage>Physical Networks>properties and change the binding to your new dvswitch

• In LM System> Organizations> edit each organization and change the default to allow configs to deploy across multiple hosts. This is also totally optional and depends on your sites needs..

• In LM do some testing as it should be working now...

• In LM System>Settings>LDAP> reconnect LDAP

We are now up and running with host spaning. I would keep your expectations low for this magically making HA/DRS/Vmotion work across all your hosts seamless. Our cluster has a few different but fairly closely related intel CPU's and it's still problematic. You can get into all kinds of trouble with saved states and revert points. One example would be a vm that has a revert point created on one host that gets moved to a host with a slightly different cpu type. This vm will fail to revert.

My other concern with this Is the service vm's that provide the host spanning transport network deployed into some resource pools that I didn't want them in. It's not clear how you get them to be created in a specified resource pool. Also you will need to disable host spaning on any host you want to put in maintenance mode.

Blake