This particular video (and subsequent post) was inspired by folks who have reached out to me and specifically asked how to migrate a vSphere environment from a standard to distributed switch when the vCenter VM was also included. The issue usually revolves around the physical uplink (network adapter) migration – the brief interruption in network traffic often causes a migration effort to fail in some sort of half broken state because the vCenter VM is unable to issue commands.

This video walks through a tried and true process that I have literally used to migrate onto a VDS (with a virtual vCenter Server) for years across a multitude of vSphere builds. Assuming you have already created the VDS, and that you are using a redundant pair of uplinks, the four main steps are:
- Remove a single physical uplink from the VSS
- Add the available physical uplink to the VDS
- Migrate any host VMkernel ports and the vCenter Server VM to the VDS
- Migrate the remaining physical upinks from the VSS to the VDS and optionally remove the old VSS
A few folks have asked me – why not just combine steps 1 and 2 together and use the migrate feature? You’re more than welcome to do this in the vSphere Web Client (which makes it quite simple), but I tend to like ripping out an uplink from the VSS and then eyeballing the VSS to ensure nothing nasty has happened. Call me old school.