Moving an ESX/ESXi host with vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS) between vCenter Servers

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Migrating an ESXi host to a different vCenter Server requires manual network reconfiguration when vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS) are in use. Because a vDS is managed exclusively by its parent vCenter instance, hosts cannot maintain vDS connectivity during an inventory move. This process utilizes a Standard Switch (vSS) as a temporary bridge to maintain Management and iSCSI connectivity.

 

Considerations prior to migration:

• The High Availability setting needs to be recreated on the new vCenter Server prior to host migration.
  
  
• DRS needs to be set to manual or disabled prior to moving the ESX/ESXi host. DRS settings needs to be created on the destination vCenter Server. This also removes resource pools from the ESXi/ESX host. For more information, see Disabling VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) (339325).
  
  
• Storage DRS needs to be set to manual and the configuration duplicated on the destination vCenter Server. For more information on enabling and disabling storage DRS, see Enabling and disabling Storage DRS (SDRS) in the vSphere Web Client (310161).
  
  
• If ESXi hosts are part of a vSAN cluster, extra steps must be taken to avoid hosts losing their unicast configuration when moved to a new vCenter inventory, causing VMs to become inaccessible. See Moving a vSAN Cluster from one vCenter Server to another ( = Migrating )

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0 / 8.0

VMware vCenter Server 7.0 / 8.0

Resolution

To move an ESX/ESXi host with vSphere Distributed Switch from one vCenter Server to another:

1. Back up the vSphere Distributed Switch configuration. See Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web client (338595).
   
   
2. Create a Standard Switch (vSS) on the ESXi host for the Virtual Machines, VMkernel adapters, and management traffic.
   
   
3. Migrate host networking from the vDS to the newly created vSS. See Migrate Virtual Machines (VMs) and VMkernel Adapters from Distributed Switch (vDS) to Standard Switch (vSS) (306406).
   
   
4. Remove the ESXi host from the source vCenter cluster.
5. Add the ESXi host to the destination vCenter Server.
   
   
   • Note: If the destination cluster uses EVC, power off all VMs before adding the host.
6. Create or import the Distributed Switches on the destination vCenter Server.
   
   
   • Note: To import vSphere Distributed Switch configuration from the backup created in Step 1, see Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web Client (338595).
     
     
7. Migrate the new host networking from Standard Switch to vSphere Distributed Switch. See Migrating Service Console and/or VMkernel port from Standard Switches to Distributed Switch and Migrating virtual machines between vSwitch or PortGroups to vDS or dvPortgroups (329120).

Additional Information

For related information, see the following KBs:

How to move ESXi/ESX host from one vCenter Server to another
Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web Client