In my haste to
rebuild a lab environment, I
ungracefully disconnected a host whose management vmknic was connected to a
dvSwitch. The plan was to add the host
to a new vCenter…. a new vCenter that
did not know of the previous dvSwitch associated with the host's management
vmknic, not smart on my part!
Up until this point
my mistake was still not apparent to me.
I was able to add the host to the new vCenter without issue.
However,
when I went into the vSphere Client to view the host's network
configuration I noticed something odd:
no vSwitches!
I clicked on the
vSphere Distributed Switch button (below image) and saw that the host still was
referencing the DWsitch1 dvSwitch.
I
thought, OK not a problem I could still use the
Manage
Physical Adapters link to migrate a vmnic to a local vSwitch right?
Nope.
Since the DSwitch1 dvSwitch was recognized as a dvSwitch,
but not managed by the new vCenter,
I wasn't permitted to move either of its NICs
to a local vSwitch.
Since I could not
migrate the physical NICs associated with DSwitch1 to vSwitch0 from the
GUI, I had to figure out how to do it
from the command-line. The ESXCLI
command is the preferred on host CLI utility allowing you to modify MOST ESXi
configuration settings. However, ESXCLI still does not allow you to modify
dvSwitches. While ESXCLI doesn't allow
you to modify DV Switches, it does allow
you to list the DV Switch configuration.
I executed the following command to view the DSwitch1 configuration:
esxcli network vswitch dvs vmware
list
Now that I could see
how the orphaned DSwitch1's configuration, I needed to figure out if there was
a way to disassociate the vmnic's, one
at a time, from DSwitch1 so that I could add them to vSwitch0 without losing my
management connection to the host.
I Googled on how to
remove a vmnic from a dvSwitch and found this Vmware KB:
I executed the
following esxcfg-vswitch command to remove one of the redundant vmnics from
DSwitch1:
esxcfg-vswitch -Q vmnic0 -V 16
DSwitch1
(NOTE: 16 is the
Port ID gathered using the ESXCLI command)
Once I did this I
went into the vSphere Client and created vSwitch0. Since vmnic0 was successfully removed from
DSwitch1, I was able to add it to
vSwitch0 from the vSphere Client GUI.
Now that I had a
vSwitch with a vmnic on it that contained the vSphere Management VLAN on
it, I still needed to migrate the
vmkernel port to vSwitch0. From Host -> Configuration -> Networking I
clicked on vSphere Distributed Switch and
then choose Manage Virtual Adapters. I clicked on vmk0 and chose Migrate -> vSwitch0 and saved the
changes. Vmk0 migrated to vSwitch0
without any downtime. To remove the 2nd
physical NIC from the orphaned DSwitch1 I then executed:
esxcfg-vswitch -Q vmnic1 -V 17 DSwitch1
Once the 2nd NIC was
removed I was able to add it to vSwitch0 for redundancy.
Crisis averted.
Labels: dvSwitch, esxcfg-vswitch, esxcli, hidden nic, migrate vmk, Network, Virtual Distributed Switch, VLAN, vmk, vmkernel, vSphere, vSwitch
