Migration of Virtual Machines between Distributed Switches

[Tom_Evans]

Morning All,

I'm hoping someone can assist me with some queries i have around migration of virtual machine from one distributed switch (v6.5.0) port group to a port group on a different distributed switch that is running a different version (v7.0.3).

The reason for creation to a new distributed switch is part of a migration away from 10Gb and converging of network resulting in reduction of physical NICs. The new distributed switch will be configured with all relevant port groups and the physical network having all required VLANs trunked on the ports.

All hosts will have access to both the current distributed switch and the new distributed switch. As a new distributed switch is being created it makes sense to create on the latest version supported rather than the version of the current distributed switch.

My question is how can i move the virtual machines to port groups on the new distributed switch without incurring any downtime? Is it as straight forward as changing the network adapter for each VM?

My confusion is coming from articles such as Migrating a virtual machine between two different vDS versions which I'm not sure is relevant because is this only when running a vMotion of the VM to a different host in the cluster? And then contradictory to that this article Known issues when upgrading a DVS from 6.5 or earlier to DVS 6.6 or later which talks about issues possibly upgrading to v6.6.0 vDS and the recommendation is to create a new vDS and move the workload across.

Thanks in advance for any assistance with this thread.

[Alexandru Capras]

Hi Tom,

So you're basically keeping the VMs running on the same hosts and only changing the vDS?
There's a nice built-in feature on the dPG that allows you to migrate VMs to another network - you can try it on a non-critical or test VM first to see how it goes.

[Tom_Evans]

Thanks for your reply.

Yep that's correct, VMs will remain on the same host just moving to a new vDS (and Port Group). 

New vDS will be configured with new Physical ports in the host so no migration of current physical NICs to the new vDS. 

Thanks

[Alexandru Capras]

Happy to help.
You can check out this blog post if you'd like a real example of a migration. In the blog post it's going from a standard to a distributed switch, but the flow is pretty much the same, especially the part where you right-click on the source distributed port group and hit "Migrate VMs to another network..."