Reinstalling vCenter that have vDS

[elopezvaldez]

Hi community!

Very straight forward question, can I reinstall a vCenter Server that have a vDS configured on several hosts? Does the hosts will lose the vDS configuration? Does the vDS configuration resides on the ESXi hosts and when I finishes the reinstall and add them back to the newly installed vCenter the configuration will stay the same?

Is very important to me, because the vDS have the vmkernel ports for my iSCSI storage, and if I lose those ports, well, you can imagine the whole chaos after that... So I need to know if I should just migrate the configuration to local vSwitch and port groups and then do the vCenter reinstall.

My current configuration:

1 vCenter Server virtual appliance. 6.5 embedded PSC

3 ESXi Hosts, 6.5

1 vDS for iSCSI vmkerlen ports.

[TheBobkin]

Hello elopezvaldez​,

Any particular reason you are reinstalling vC?

A new vCenter (e.g. re-install or otherwise) will not be aware of the vDS configurations.

If you want to do this live then the safest option would be to migrate to vSS and back to vDS as you said:

Pull the configs:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2034602

Follow this process:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1029498

Or if you can plan for some downtime, you can just create the new vC, export/import the configs, power down anything that requires vDS and connect the hosts to the new vC.

More Networking info that may be useful:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-65-networking-guide.pdf

Bob

[elopezvaldez]

This is exactly what I was looking for!

Thank you very much!