How to Migrate a vCenter Appliance VM to a Distributed Switch

If you try migrating the VM network for the vCenter appliance VM to a Distributed Switch, the migration fails – I’ll explain why shortly.

Read this guide to learn how to migrate the VM for the vCenter Appliance to a virtual distributed switch.

Background Information

An attempt to migrate a vCenter appliance’s VM network fails because, during the process, the VM loses network connectivity with the host. Migrating a VM’s network to a distributed switch causes slight network disruptions.

So, since the vCenter appliance’s VM is responsible for the network migration, when the VM loses network connectivity with its ESXi host, the migration fails and is rolled back.

Here is a screenshot of the error message.

The walkaround is to migrate the VM network for at least one other ESXi host in vCenter. After that, relocate the vCenter Appliance VM to the host.

Finally, move the VM network for the previous ESXi host for the vCenter Appliance VM to the distributed switch.

The screenshot below shows my lab’s vCenter server with three ESXi hosts. My vCenter appliance VM, IPMvCSA is currently hosted in the ipmpvmw2 ESXi host.

Meanwhile, I have already moved the VM networks for the other 2 ESXi hosts to a distributed switch. In this demonstration, I’ll migrate the vCenter appliance VM to ipmpvmw1 or ipmpvmw3.

After that, I’ll migrate the VM network for ipmpvmw2. The following sections explain the detailed steps to complete these tasks.

Step 1: Migrate the VM Network of Another Host

As I mentioned earlier, the first step is to create a distributed switch, add hosts to the switch, and migrate the VM network for at least one of the hosts.

I have a comprehensive guide with the steps. Read the guide via this link How to Create and Configure Virtual Distributed Switch in vCenter.

Once you have completed the steps in the above guide, proceed to step 2 below.

Step 2: Move the vCenter Appliance VM

Before migrating the vCenter appliance VM, ensure that the destination ESXi host has access to a datastore with enough space for the VM.

1. Navigate to the vCenter appliance VM, right-click it, and select Migrate…

2. Then, on the first page of the VM migration wizard, select the third option, Change both compute resource and storage.

3. Select a destination host. To ensure that you’re not selecting the same host as the source, click the VM ORIGIN info icon on the top right of the wizard’s page.

When you select a destination host, vCenter will perform some compatibility tests which include datastore configuration and space, and network interface configuration. If the destination ESXi hots has any incompatibility issues, vCenter will display the reason.

4. On the Select storage page, choose a datastore on the destination host. In this demonstration, I’m using an iSCSI datastore accessible to all ESXi hosts managed by vCenter.

5. The wizard now loads the Select networks page. Click the Destination network drop-down and select the distributed port group you use for the VM network on the destination host.

Mine is called mgt-DPG.

6. Finally, configure the vMotion priority option, review the VM’s migration settings and click FINISH to initiate the migration.

You can monitor the progress of the migration by expanding Recent Tasks at the bottom of the vCenter web client.

Step 3: Migrate the Previous Host’s VM Network

After moving the vCenter VM off to a host in the distributed switch network, you can now migrate the standard switch settings on the previous host to the existing distributed switch.

In my lab, I’ll be performing this task on ipmpvmw2, the ESXi host the vCenter appliance VM was migrated from.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Left-click the ESXi host to select it. Then, click Configuration > expand Networking > Virtual switches. Then, click the 3 dots next to the Distributed switch and select Migrate Networking.

2. On the Manage physical adapters page of the migration wizard, click the Assign uplink dropdown next to the physical network adapter you’re migrating. Then, select an uplink to assign it.

2. Then, on the next page, assign the VMkernel adapters to a port group on the distributed switch.

3. On this screen, if there are still VMs left on the host, check the Migrate virtual machine networking checkbox, select the VMs to migrate and proceed.

4. Finally, review your migration settings and click FINISH to start migrating the standard switch settings to the distributed switch.

When the migration completes, the distributed switch will now have at least 1 VMkernel Port and at least 1 Uplink connected to the network adapter of the ESXi host.

If you expand the standard switch, those settings will now be empty!

Conclusion

Migrating a the vCenter appliance VM’s network to a distributed switch is as straightforward as migrating any other VM. However, you must follow specific steps for the VM move to succeed.

Specifically, the first step is to create a virtual distributed switch (vDS) and migrate at least one ESXi host to the vDS. After that, migrate the appliance’s VM to the host in the vDS.

The final step is to migrate the previous VM appliance’s host to the vDS and you’re done – easy as 1, 2, 3!

I hope you were excited to read this guide as I was writing it. Let me know if you have any questions – use the “Leave a comment” form at the end of this page.

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