Migrating VMkernels

Today I’m going to show you a little trick I found in the vSphere C# client that I have not previously seen anyone mention, I didn’t even find until last week. Reason I found is simple I had a need to live migrate a VMkernel.

Scenario:

You have one or more Distributed Switches (VDS) which have two or more uplinks. You need to move e.g. the VMkernel NIC handling Management Traffic from the VDS to a normal Virtual Switch (VS) on the host. And you want to do this without losing connectivity from vCenter to the ESXi host.

Reason:

Why would you need this you may ask. For us the reason was simple, we needed to move ESXi hosts with live VMs from one vCenter to another. If all traffic including management and vMotion is handled by VDSs disconnecting from the vCenter would remove connectivity as VDSs are a vCenter/cluster construct.

I search a lot to find how to do it and always ended up with the solution “Use the DCUI and restore management switch and vmkernel from there and reattach uplinks”. But that would shortly disconnect the ESXi host from the vCenter and I would have to login to each hosts remote console software (DRAC, iLo etc). Tedious work.

Method:

This little nifty trick:

vmk1

When marking a VMkernel and clicking migrate you get a dialog like below where you select the VS you want to migrate to:

vmk2

And in the next step set a name and a VLAN ID for the port group and you are done:

vmk3

Easy. Just remember – and this is the important step – To avoid downtime and losing connectivity you need to first move one of the uplinks to the VS you want to migrate to so that there is an available physical connection. Once you have migrated you can move the other uplink(s) to the VS and you are done! Easy, and all done from the vSphere client! If you are a real pro most of it could probably be scripted as well but due to only have a few hosts I felt more comfortable just doing it by hand, one at a time.

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