Urgent dvSwitch & vCentre Problem

[mpjubbGaltec]

Good afternoon,

My predecessor decided to use dvswitches on our 3 hosts.  Unfortunately he didnt get them working properly on 2 of them and could get the 3rd working at all.

On top of that the virtual vCentre server has been reinstalled which means the new vcentre server doesnt have any of the dvswitch settings.

We have 2 x ESX4.1 hosts, with the dvswitches, and 1 x ESXi4.1 host, with no dvSwitches on it now.

Now that we have a new vcentre server, I need a solution to get management of the vm's again, whether I move all of the vm's back into vswitches or get the vcentre server configured to work with the dvswitches.

Another problem I have is if i create a new vswitch, give it a nic, move a vm into it and change its switch group, its sa if it belongs on another network.  I cant ping it.  If i put another vm into the same vswitch group, they can ping each other.

IP ranges and VLANS are correct.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Martin

[sodasin]

I've had this same happen about 3-4 times so far.  When the vcenter server goes down and you have a dvs it's a pain.  You will more than likely occur some downtime.  You can either stand another one up and create another dvs like the previous one and migrate the host in.  You could also convert it to a standard switch and then migrate it in, both ways work it just depends how you have your management interface configured and if you have some sort of access to the physical machine to check the management properties.  As far as not being able to ping each other I'd triple check your settings from the physical switch all the way back, I have had similar issues and it was either that or some crazy firewall setting with the virtual machines.

[mpjubbGaltec]

Thanks for the response.

This issue was a combination of incorrect documentation (our network details) and losing our vcentre server.  once we got a new vcentre server up and running and figured what was actually happening on the network it was a case of migrate the vm's onto standard vswitches, migrate the service console and we are back in business.

[sodasin]

Yea if there's one thing I've learned as a whole using dvs and vmware it's don't let your vcenter server go down.