Cannot migrate from vswitch to distributed switch with only one physical NIC

networkingvmware-esxivmware-vcentervmware-vsphere

I am trying to migrate vmkernel management interface from vswitch0 to vDS on ESXi 5.1 as lots of documents on the internet are describing , but it keeps disconnecting me and reverting the changes back.

Any ideas on how to migrate to vDS when having only one physical uplink which is already attached to vswitch0?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

I have had to do this exact same task with single NIC computers such as Intel NUCs and Apple Mac Minis that I have had running ESXi in a vSphere cluster.

The underlying problem is that as the vmKernel ports are moved, connectivity with the vCenter server is lost, and as a result, the configuration is rolled back to a last-known good. This rollback is what we want to temporarily disable.

Following the instructions here, you can disable rollback, which will allow the migration wizards in the Web client to complete successfully.

  1. Browse to a vCenter Server in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
  2. Click the Manage tab, and select Settings.
  3. Select Advanced Settings and click Edit.
  4. Select the config.vpxd.network.rollback key, and change the value to false. If the key is not present, you can add it and set the value to false.
  5. Click OK.

After successfully migrating your infrastructure to use dvSwitches, don't forget to change this value back to true.

Related Topic