Can you move ESXi Hosts with distributed switches from one vCenter to another?

[abugeja]

Hi,

Can you move ESXi Hosts with distributed switches from one vCenter to another? I know you couldn't under previous versions of ESXi but I assume that has changed now.

We do it all the time with hosts that use the standard switches so that is not an issue.

[bayupw]

The supported way is to migrate to vSS, move to other vCenter, then migrate to vDS as per this KB: Moving an ESX/ESXi host with vDS from one vCenter Server to another (1029498) | VMware KB

You can export vDS and import to new vCenter with preserved identifiers but I believe this is not supported and there are some caveats as explained in this blog:

https://virtualdatacave.com/2016/03/moving-esxi-5-5-with-distributed-switch-to-new-vcenter-6-0/

Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web Client (2034602) | VMware...

Note: While importing dvswitch settings to a different vCenter Server, do not select Preserve origin...

[abugeja]

dvs's are a pain to support compared to the standard vswitch!! Unless you have an extremely large environment to support I see no benefit in them.

[bayupw]

there are also some features that only available in vDS such as Network I/O Control, Load Based Teaming/Route based on Physical NIC Load, LACP, etc

some product/software integration such as VMware NSX or Cisco ACI VMM also require vDS