Upgrading ESXi hosts from vSphere 8.0 U2 to vSphere 8.0 U3 (or later) could cause VDS configuration drifts in certain vSphere Configuration Profiles(VCP) clusters

Products

• VMware vCenter Server 8.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

If upgrading ESXi hosts to 8.0 U3 or higher and one or more hosts are on VDS, compliance checks on the VCP cluster could report drift on VDS configurations. The VDS drift happens only under certain unique circumstances.

Environment

Upgrading from vSphere 8.0 U2 to 8.0 U3 and higher

Cause

VDS configurations are now integrated with VCP and are actively managed.

For example, if an 8.0 U2 cluster with VDS is upgraded to 8.0 U3, the new VDS configurations detected on the 8.0 U3 host could be reported as drift.

To avoid such drift, VCP runs an auto-patch task that patches the desired cluster configuration with the VDS configurations from the ESXi hosts.

Under typical scenarios, the upgrade would be incident-free. However, auto-patching would not be triggered if a pre-existing drift exists in specific critical networking configurations like physical nic, vmknic, or vSphere Standard Switch. After an upgrade, users would see previously existing configuration drift and new drift in VDS configurations.

Resolution

If the administrator aims to absorb all or some of the drift into the desired document, perform the "ImportFromHost" workflow using the Drafts UI. This workflow will help pull configurations from all the hosts, including VDS configurations, and make a new desired cluster configuration.