DRS in a cluster as I slowly migrate hosts over from vSwitches to vDS

[henry857]

Hi everyone,

I'm getting ready to migrate all of my virtual machines over to vDS. I was thinking about first getting all my hosts on the vDS mgmt and vmotion network first. Then slowly migrate my VM network port groups over with the associated VM's for each host, one by one.

My question is should I disable DRS during all of this? I want to do this over the span of a few days. Is DRS smart enough not to migrate a machine from a vDS host with physical NIC's allocated for vDS VM Network traffic, to a host without any pNIC's assigned to VM network vDS (Those NICS still assigned to vswitch)

[henry857]

Or does DRS only care about the vMotion network and the host being in the same cluster? I know DRS performs checks, I want to know if this is one of them.

[HeathReynolds]

So you can't vMotion a VM from the standard switch to the distributed switch.

Here is how we cut these over. Move half of the physical network interfaces on each host from your standard switches to the new distributed switch. Now every host has access to the standard switch networks and the distributed switch networks. Make you port groups for MGMT and vMotion, then move the VMkernel interfaces over. Make you port groups for you VM networks, then move the VMs over. After you have moved all of the VMs you can then move the remaining physical NICs over to the distributed switch and delete the standard switch.

I would do this over the course of one day, since unless you have a ton of network interfaces in your server you probably won't have network redundancy to your virtual switches during the migration.

[bayupw]

Agree with the steps explained by HeathReynolds

The steps to change/move/migrate VSS to VDS are described in below KB

VMware KB: Migrating service console or VMkernel port from standard switches to VMware vSphere Distr...

VMware KB: Migrating virtual machines between vSwitch or PortGroups to vDS or dvPortgroups