I also posted this in the storage forum, but I figured I'd ask here too.
TLDR: Does anyone know a good way to migrate the networking on a host that was on a distributed switch and its vCenter is dead and being rebuilt from scratch?
We have a dead vCenter. Utterly dead. I'm rebuilding vCenter and will add the hosts into the new vCenter. The complication comes in with the distributed virtual switch with iSCSI vmks. Each host has a proxy switch (the offline copy of the dvs), so the hosts can see its iSCSI storage. We wont be able to export the DVS config from the dead vCenter, so I will have to migrate each hosts networking and iSCSI storage adapter to a standard switch, build a new DVS, and migrate the hosts over to that. All without the hosts losing network or storage connectivity. Each host has two iSCSI VMKs with a NIC associated with each on the DVS
This is my plan:
Once I confirm that the new VMK on the standard switch has a path to storage I should be able to do the same for the remaining iSCSI vmk on the host proxy switch (VDS).
Does this sound like it will work? I've never migrated iSCSI between standard and distributed switches. These are old 5.0 hosts so I really want to avoid an APD event.
If you have your DB backup then this will restore your DVS configuration. What is OS specification of old vCenter, if it is Windows based vCenter and at least able to boot then you can get database .mdf and .ldf files from there and can restore them.
If you dont have database backup then the option you have mentioned is correct to perform.
1. Create VSS on each host.
2. Migrate Network from VDS to VSS.
3. Create new VDS on new vCenter.
4. Migrate network back to VDS.
If you have your DB backup then this will restore your DVS configuration. What is OS specification of old vCenter, if it is Windows based vCenter and at least able to boot then you can get database .mdf and .ldf files from there and can restore them.
If you dont have database backup then the option you have mentioned is correct to perform.
1. Create VSS on each host.
2. Migrate Network from VDS to VSS.
3. Create new VDS on new vCenter.
4. Migrate network back to VDS.