Help! Distributed Switch in my LAB issues!

[xchangepatewon]

i setup a physical lab consisting of the following:

two Optiplex 990 small form factors (all i had lying around) as my two esxi hosts ( one Intel 82579LM Gigabit NIC in each host no slots on the small form factor to add any other ones)

1 dell precision T3500 running freenas 9.1 amd64 with:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3670 @ 3.20GHz

12266MB

1 integrated NIC as well

iscsi configured

my esxi standard switches are as follows:

it adds the host but shows a warning but when it tries updating the network i get an error with these details.  The VM that i am moving is the DC for my lab, would that be the reason i am getting this message since it appears based on this error message that my vcenter server loses connectivity to it?

when i try and add my second host it adds it ok. i have a VM that is currently turned off and was able to move it to the vds.

Any thoughts on where i should start to resolve this problem?

[vLarus]

Hello,

first of all I recommend creating a separate Portgroup for the management traffic (even though its on the same VLAN/Broadcast range).

So you should have a Portgroup called MGMT, or something similar, and move the Management to that portgroup.

And when you move the VM networking you select the default dvPortGroup.

This procedure has always worked for me.

Hope this helps.

regards,

Larus.

[xchangepatewon]

i seem to be having a hell of a time with this. Not sure if its because i only have one nic on my esxi host or if something else is going on. Every time i try to add it to the dvs, i run into problem of not being able to connect the pnic on 192.168.200.10 to the dvs as described above.

192.168.200.10 currently has the only domain controller and vcenter running on it.

What am i missing, or is this just the problem that can't be fixed when you only have one pNIC in a ESXi host that is running the DC and vcenter?

vLarus - When you said you recommend i create a new MGMT port group were you refering to doing that on the standard switch first, or did you mean on the distributed switch?

[vLarus]

If the vCenter is dropping it's connection during the move you will have problems moving the host hosting the vCenter to a distributed switch at the same time.

Create the Port group in the distributed switch.

So you will have 2 portgroups on the distributed switch, one named dvPortgroup and called MGMT.

Move VM networks to dvPortGroup, and move the management to MGMT.

http://blog.bradpayne.org/?p=137

You can try this method described in the first comment to this blog.

Let me know if this works, it will be good to know if this is the correct procedure.

regards,

Larus

[xchangepatewon]

vLarus,

So i got it working finally thanks to your link. i actually used this solution but i did not do task 6. I did not understand what they were wanting me to do. i originally renamed my vcenter to "vcenter server - old" then cloned it to a my other esxi host using a different iscsi lun on my freenas. i browsed the datastore and the file names were showing as the original name "vcenter server" and not "vcenter server - old". i changed the new vcenter clone network settings to my dvportgroup. powered down my old vcenter. powered on the new one and finished moving my vm's to the dvs!  here is what it looks like now.

Method i used to get vcenter server on dvs with only one pNIC

1. Rename the exiting vCenter to a new name in the inventory

2. Clone the vCenter to the old vcenter name (destination should be on a host which has vDS configured). Cloning destination datastore should not be same to avoid any VMFS VM name issues

Note: You need two datastore in the ESX to do this.

3. Change the cloned VM’s network settings to use the desired vDS portgroup

4. Shutdown the existing vCenter

5. Connect to the ESX host which has the cloned vCenter VM

6. using vmkfstools -i command clone the latest disk from old vCenter to a new vCenter (use the same VMDK names for destination)

7. Bring up the new vCenter and you are good to go

Should i have done task 6 on the solution above? i have removed my vcenter old that was stuck on my esxi host 192.168.200.10 from inventory for now and was planning on just deleting it if i dont need to do that step.