ESXi 6.5 and 7.0 hosts - Moving network connection to new switch

[schambers]

Hello,

This weekend we will be replacing our existing core switches with new ones. Since we have redundant switches and connections to them, our plan was to just unplug the network cable from the existing switch into the new. Then perform the same step with the redundant switch and and network cable to the new secondary switch. 

Just curious if anyone had any thoughts or recommendations (Steps) on this? Our vendor thought that maybe we would have to clear the ARP cache table on the ESXi hosts but from what I understand this requires a reboot of the host. 

Thank you,

Steve

[Lalegre · Accepted solution]

Hey @schambers,

Well to be honest with you as you have two different adapters, the ESXi will detects one of the Uplinks as down and it will forward the connections to the secondary adapter that you have as Active or Standby in your portgroup. This is how Link Status only configuration works.

But as you are mentioning Core switch I presume you have some intermediate switches for connecting your ESXis so in your case you could try configuring Beacon Probing to detect that but if you can shutdown one of the redundant switches, that will be better as the ESXi will just rely in Link Status which will avoid any type of issues.

You should not need to clean the ARP table.

[schambers]

Thank you for the response Lalegre. Have a new ESXi host that we are going to bring into production soon so i just used that to perform a test. Seems that moving the VMs off of the host, moving the data connections to the new switches then migrating the VMs back worked with no issues so i think we will be fine. Worse case it seems that rebooting the hosts would clear the ARP table but as you mentioned it does not seem necessary.