moved vm's to dvswitch portgroup before moving vmknic and mgt net

[InflatableMouse]

I made a f*p. Luckily, its in our development / test network. Colleagues laughed and wished me good luck ;).

I created a new distributed vswitch with a new portgroup. I moved my vm's including vcenter appliance before creating a new management network and vmkernel nic, so I lost access to vcenter and all the vm's lost their network connectivity. The new portgroup didn't have an uplink either.

Can someone help me fix this? I reckon I need to access the virtual console on the vcenter, or perhaps esxcli?

I tried in esx webui itself from the hypervisor host the vm's reside on, but I couldn't move anything to or from the dvswitch.

Appreviate any help!

Thanks!

[pmichelli · Accepted solution]

You are somewhat stuck. Here is what I would do :

Login to the ESXi server (not sure how many you have, I will assume one) that is running all these VMs and power them off.

Next you will need access to the ESXi server console, via iDRAC or iLO or some other method

Use F2 to get into troubleshooting mode, and then you can reset the networking on that host. Once reset reconfigure it using standard switches as you had before.

Then you can login to the ESXi host, create the rest of your portgroups and move the VMs back to them, and power them on.

This should get your VMs talking again.

The part I am not 100% sure on is what vCenter will do since its going to think the host should still be attached to the dVS. I believe there is a way to force remove a "dead" server from the dVS then you can simply try again.

EDIT : On second thought, if you power them off from the ESXi console, you can move them back to a standard port group if you still have them created. You can't move dVS to Standard while powered on but you can when they are off

[InflatableMouse]

Thanks!

In the meantime, I was looking at this:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008127

I don't understand the article though, its unclear what the example text should be; vmnic is which field exactly from the list commands shown above. The examples they give are unrelated to the fields from list command. I hope that makes sense.

Or perhaps those steps won't help me? What do you think?

[InflatableMouse]

I'll check out your edit first! We were posting and editing at the same time!

CHeers!

[InflatableMouse]

This is what I see when I attempt to change (or add a new) nic:

Addition or reconfiguration of network adapters attached to non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups (dpg_storage) is not supported.

[InflatableMouse]

Marked correct for the reset from ESX console.

Turned off didn't allow me to change the network config, but the reset did clear the network fields and allowed to choose the VM Network again.

Thanks again for the help!

[pmichelli]

You're welcome. Glad I could help out !