How to Migrate the VM’s to vSphere Distributed Switch ?

When it comes to VMware networking , you should know about VSS  (vSphere Standard Switch) and VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). This article is going to demonstrate the migration of  virtual machines  from VSS (vSphere Standard Switch) to VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). First we will see why do we need to virtualize the networking in VMware environment.The virtual networking provides various services to ESXI host and VM guests. Using the virtual network services , you can connect the virtual machine to the physical network and connect to the VMkernel services like NFS,iSCSI and vMotion to the physical network environment.

What is the Difference between VSS and VDS?                                                                        VSS is controlled on the local host level .But VDS is controlled from vCenter server.If you use VSS, maintaining the similar network configuration across  all the ESXi  is very difficult. But in VDS, same configuration will be pushed across all the ESXi hosts from the vCenter server. If there is any configuration mismatch on the network level , You may not be able to migrate the VM’s to another host using VMotion. So these kind of issues will be eliminated if you use VDS (vSphere Distributed Switch). VDS also supports third part virtual switches.

In this article , i am going to demonstrate the migration of two virtual machines from VSS (vSphere standard switch)to VDS (vSphere Distributed switch).

Environment:vSphere 5.5

Impact : No impact to the VM machines. This migration is completely transparent.

Virtual machines Names:

1. VOVA
2. SUSE-Linux

1.Login to vSphere Client and determine the virtual machine’s current network.

Here is the networking information for SUSE-Linux VM and you can see its using vSphere standard switch.

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• If you do not have existing vSphere distributed virtual switch,just create it by following this article.Here i have already created the vSphere distributed switch and added the ESXi hosts to that.Refer this article.

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2.Navigate it to Home- > Inventory – > Networking . Just right Click the VDS switch to migrate the VM’s to it .

 

3.In this wizard , you need to select the source network and destination network for VM’s that needs to be migrated .Here i have select the VM network as source (Which is my VSS network) and destination network as vSphere distributed switch(UA-VDS1)

 

4.Select the VM’s which needs to be migrated to vSphere distributed switch.

 

5.Here is the summary of the migration. Click finish to start the live migration from vSphere standard switch to vSphere distributed switch.

 

6.You can monitor the activity in the task list .

 

7.Click on the vSphere distributed port group and see new ports active for VM’s.

 

8.Navigate to Home – > Inventory – > Hosts & clusters.Click on the ESXi host – > Configuration – > Networking  – > vSphere Distributed Switch.You can see that virtual machine “VOVA” has been migrated from VSS to VDS .

The same way you can also verify for SUSE-Linux virtual machine by clicking its parent ESXi host.

Note:No need to halt the VM’s for this migration. You can perform this change on fly.

We have successfully migrated the VM’s from vSphere standard switch to vSphere distributed switch.The below diagram will explain you about .

If  the vCenter server is down also vSphere distributed switch is available for VM’s.

You can find the reverse operation here.I meant VDS to VSS migration.

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