Upgrading distributed virtual switch from 4.1 to 5.0

[14163]

Hello,

does anybody know how or where to get technical information about the dvswitch upgrade from 4.1 to 5.0? Is this just an upgrade on the management side or does it initiate software changes on the esxi hosts? I opened a ticket at vmware for this to be able to make a risk evaluation about upgrading our production environment, but all I got was to schedule a downtime for it in case something got wrong.

If it is only a extension of the management functionality, I assume it could not lead to network disruption until the next configuration change via the upgraded management software...

Kind regards,

Holger

[rickardnobel]

I have not seen anything official that the upgrade is nothing more than more features is enabled when you raise the version number of the Distributed vSwitch.

VMware should however be able to verify this by your request.

[chriswahl]

I've done the upgrade a few times (from both 4.0 to 4.1 and to 5.0) in production environments. As long as the host validation piece passes, the upgrade proceeds and the version number increments. I'm not aware of any software changes on the ESXi hosts - the validation check should ensure that they already have the ability to run the vDS at this level, and the new options suddenly appear after upgrading.

So from my experience, it's a rather boring event to upgrade it (which is a good thing). Of course, I'm not the official source on this.

[Brian_Wing]

Holger,

How did your upgrade go?  Did any of your connected VMs experience any network drops?

Thanks

Brian

[14163]

Hello Brian,

thanks for asking. All went well without any influence on connectivity.

Meanwhile however, we are already on 5.1

Regards,

Holger

Am 18.01.2013 um 17:43 schrieb "Brian Wing" <communities-emailer@vmware.com<mailto:communities-emailer@vmware.com>>:

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Upgrading distributed virtual switch from 4.1 to 5.0

reply from Brian Wing<http://communities.vmware.com/people/Brian.Wing> in VMware vSphere™ vNetwork - View the full discussion<http://communities.vmware.com/message/2180444#2180444