Migrating Hosts with dvSwitches

[elihuj]

This is a follow up to a post I had here earlier. We are actually in the process of testing our POC for this migration. We have a few hosts that we've installed 4.1 on, with a handful of VMs for testing. Our ultimate goal is to upgrade the host to 5.0, and then import it into our new vCenter with the VMs attached to avoid any downtime.

A colleague brought up a good point about the use of dvSwitches. While there are a handful of clusters using standard switches, the majority of our newer clusters are all using dvSwitches. Since dvSwitches aren't stored on the host, will we still be able to migrate these to 5.0 while avoiding VM downtime? Or will this plan require the use of standard switches only to succeed?

[Gortee]

Evening

dvSwitche configuration is stored in vcenter.  Each ESXi host holds portions of the switch which relate to it's virtual machines.  This enables the switch to operate when vcenter is not present.   So if you are doing a rolling upgrade without loss of vcenter you will be fine.   If you follow this process you should not have any real downtime:

1. Upgrade to 5.xxx with current vcenter

2. Move a single with a spare nic into new vcenter

3. Add spare nic to new vcenter's dvswitch (assume that dvswitch has the same port groups as old)

4. Migrate vm's one at a time to new switch.  This migrate will cause the vm to be unavailable for a few seconds. 

Let me know if you have additional questions.

Thanks,

J

[elihuj]

How would we get our new 5.0 host (with connected VMs) into the new vCenter without any downtime on the VMs though? Could we take one NIC and create a standard switch with all our VM port groups (on the new 5.0 host), and vMotion the VMs onto the host. Then once we disconnect the host and import it into the new vCenter, take another NIC and create a dvSwitch that way? Once that is completed we can migrate from the standard to the dvSwitch?

[Gav0]

That would work.

- created VSS & PG's and add/migrate available nics

- migrate VM's to VSS

- remove host from VDS

- remove/disconnect host from vCenter1

- add host to vCenter2

- migrate networking to VDS on vCenter2

EDIT - be sure to test this in your Lab/POC environment so you are familiar with the exact process.

[elihuj]

Thank you for the reply Gav0. We will be testing this shortly.. hoping for the best!