rename portgroup

[roneng]

I have seen some scripts that do that here, but they all (or i got it wrong) disconnect the VM's

Is there a way to rename the portgroup , and automatically change all the VM's networks according to the new name?

[LucD]

How did you change the portgroupname ?

With PowerCLI

Get-VMHost <esx-name> | Get-VirtualPortGroup -Name <current-pg-name> | Set-VirtualPortGroup -Name <new-pg-name>

or did you use the UpdatePortGroup method ?

$oldName = <current-pg-name>
$newName = <new-pg-name>
$esx = Get-VMHost <esx-name> | Get-View
$netSys = Get-View $esx.ConfigManager.NetworkSystem
$pg = $esx.Config.Network.Portgroup | where {$_.Spec.Name -eq $oldName}
$spec = $pg.Spec
$spec.Name = $newName
$netSys.UpdatePortGroup($oldName, $spec)

____________

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Twitter: lucd22

[roneng]

HI and thanks

I understand both of them (at least i think so)

But my question is what will happen to all the VM's that are connected to this portgroup?

[LucD · Accepted solution]

As long as the VMs are powered on they will display the "old" name in the Settings.

I suspect that's because the name is just a property of the portgroup.

Internally ESX doesn't use the actual name to find out which portgroup is connected to a VM.

If the guest is restarted you will see the "new" portgroup name.

And that is probably because at that point the vSphere client reads all the properties for the connected devices.

____________

Blog: LucD notes

Twitter: lucd22

[edgrigson]

I'm about to rename quite a few of our portgroups to match our naming convention. Given the second method is more complex (compared to the one liner) is there are reason to use it? Any difference in the two approaches?

Thanks,

Ed.

[LucD]

No, use the first method.

The 2nd method is the SDK based and was used when previous builds of PowerCLI didn't have the feature yet.

____________

Blog: LucD notes

Twitter: lucd22

[edgrigson]

Thanks for the quick reply, much appreciated. Presumably I'll need to

recurse through all our hosts to see which have that portgroup

defined? Is there a more efficient way - do the properties of a

portgroup include the hosts using it? I 'm guessing not.

Regards

Ed

Sent from my iPhone

[LucD]

A quick way to find all the hosts that have a portgroup with a specific name is the following

$pgName = "MyPG"
Get-VMHost | %{
	if($_ | Get-VirtualPortGroup -Name $pgName -ea SilentlyContinue){
		$_.Name
	}
}

Note the -ea (-ErrorAction) parameter. It avoids error messages for those host where the portgroup is not present.

____________

Blog: LucD notes

Twitter: lucd22

[edgrigson]

Fab, thanks!

Sent from my iPhone

[edgrigson]

Interestingly Luc's earlier comment about not needing to change the VM properties doesn't seem correct. If I change the

portgroup name (using Get-Host | Get-VirtualPortGroup |

Set-VirtualPortGroup -Name) and then check the VM settings the entry

for the relevant network card name is indeed blank. The problem is that

if I restart the VM (or even if I power off then back on) the NIC still

shows a blank entry and is disconnected. This means if you don't follow up and rename the portgroup settings for the VMs they'll drop off the network on the next reboot. I'm testing this on vSphere

4.0U1.Here's another thread with a similar conclusion.

It also means the 'network' view in the VI client is

misleading - both the old and new network (portgroup) names are shown

and the VMs are shown (correctly) as being attached to the old network.The fix is to change the host portgroups using Luc's code and then update all the VMs to reflect the correct portgroup name - Al Renouf has already covered how to update multiple VMs, see this thread.

Regards,

Ed