Distributed switches, best practices

[trink408]

Hello,

currently building out some new clusters (6.7u3), total of 5 hosts between two clusters. We have always done standard vswitches, but I'm considering switching to distributed switches to make the setup/maintenance process easier going forward. Looking for some advice or best practices on the following questions:

• Will I run into any issues migrating my existing VM's or Vcenter because the current hosts are all running standard vswitches? I will need to migrate these vm's to the new hosts with the distributed switches
• How many distributed switches do you build, or whats the best practice for separating things out?  I have Iscsi storage so maybe that should be on a separate dswitch?
• The physical nics you add from a host to the dswitch are still used for communication on that host? Curious in regards to failover/disaster recovery models? We have a single vcenter that manages our data center and our DR site. They are directly connected by our own Fiber.

Any thoughts or links to good articles on planning this out would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[scott28tt]

Learn a lot more here: Setting Up Networking with vSphere Distributed Switches

[scott28tt]

Will I run into any issues migrating my existing VM's or Vcenter because the current hosts are all running standard vswitches? I will need to migrate these vm's to the new hosts with the distributed switches

There is a process for migrating VMs from the port group on your vSS to the port group on your vDS - best done out of hours.

How many distributed switches do you build, or whats the best practice for separating things out?  I have Iscsi storage so maybe that should be on a separate dswitch?

Same practice as for vSS

The physical nics you add from a host to the dswitch are still used for communication on that host? Curious in regards to failover/disaster recovery models? We have a single vcenter that manages our data center and our DR site. They are directly connected by our own Fiber.

The basic way that pNICs are used with a vDS is the same as with a vSS - it's the "control plane" of the vSwitch that you are centralising with a vDS, not the "data plane"