Need help with downgrading from Distributed vSwitch to vSwitch

[satish_halemani]

We are planning to downgrade Enterprise Plus to Enterprise license and hence need help with downgrading from Distributed vSwitch to normal vSwitch.

Can sometime please provide high level steps on how to achieve this and if any downtime required for the hosted VMs?

Thanks in advance

[thecloudxpert]

Hi satish_halmani,

Can you provide more information? how many VMs are you looking to move, is there just a single network per VM, what version of vSphere?

Thanks

[rcporto]

If you have more than one physical NIC you can do this migration without downtime and the high level steps are:

1) remove one of your physical NIC from your vDS;

2) create a new standard vSwitch with the physical NIC that you removed on previous step;

3) migrate your VMkernel interfaces from vDS to vSS;

4) create port groups with respective VLAN on vSS;

5) migrate your virtual machine networks from vDS to vSS;

6) remove the remaining physical NICs from your vDS and add to you vSS;

7) remove your host from vDS.

The following blog post illustrate some of steps that I have described: virtuallyPeculiar: Migrate Networking From Distributed Switch To Standard Switch

[satish_halemani]

Thanks Richardson. This is what I was looking for.

Just FYI..We have 4 NICs for each ESXi host and we have VCenter/ESXi running 5.5.

When I remove one of the Physical NICs from the vDS, it will be removed from all the portgroups associated with that vDS and if any VMs are using that NIC, they will switch over to other NICs without any downtime. Hope I got this right.