Over the 6 months I have been working hard on designing and implementing our latest infrastructure refresh and migration to another datacenter. This was a big task, especially when we had to migrate customer servers with minimal downtime. However, there were many more challenges we faced, however with the right planning in the design, these were fairly well handled.
One of the challenges was that we were using Standard vSwitches in the old 5.5/5.1 environment due to some 3rd party applications back when the environment was 4.1 which caused issues when using a vDS.
As we were building a new vCenter we decided the best method was to automate adding all the VM port groups along with their VLANs and LAG into the DvSwitch.
One thing I’ve learnt from Alan Renouf is “The best script you will ever write is one that you stole from somebody’s website” which doesn’t mean steal it and claim it as your own, but if someone has a script that does exactly what you need, then use it, just make sure you give credit where credit is due.
It just so happened by luck that right around the time I was starting to think about the process, I saw a twitter post from Ben Liebowitz “PowerCLI Script to create a new vDS Portgroups” – Beauty, this was exactly what I was after (albeit some small changes to suit).
The next step was to get a script to match to do the initial export to CSV, after a quick google I came across a Luc Dekens script that he had written for someones request on the VMware Community Forums. It was pretty straight forward and only require some lines removed so that the CSV only had the columns required for the import. So once I had the scripts, it was down to testing the process on how to use them prior to prod.
- Edit the Export vSwitch Configuration script from Luc Dekens
- Run the script
- Open the CSV (Make sure the columns names line up with the import script)
**As we are exporting from a vSwitch and importing to vDS, we will need to manually add a new column to the exported CSV called numports and place the correct number of ports in each row (by default 8) .
**Also remove any multiples of portgroups (e.g. if you have multiple hosts with the same Portgroups as these will be also in the csv) - Edit the Import script from Ben Liebowitz
– Change the vDS name and LAG name to match your environment.
– Update to the CSV path - Run the import script.
- Confirm the ports have imported by looking at the vDS.
The process is simple, so let’s break this down into some of the areas you can edit .
In the export script, all you need to edit is the lines that control what information is exported to the CSV. Just remove the lines you do not require. for example I do not need the IP address, so I would remove the below line.
@{N="IP";E={if($vNicTab.ContainsKey($pg.Name)){$vNicTab[$pg.Name].Spec.Ip.IpAddress}}}
The csv will export to the directory you have set in PowerCLI when running the script. Below is what the csv will turn out like, however note that I have also added the numports in as well.
ESX,pgName,vlanID,numports
HyperVisor-Hostname,PortGroup_1,3005,8
HyperVisor-Hostname,Portgroup_2,3005,8
HyperVisor-Hostname,Portgroup_13,3007,8
HyperVisor-Hostname,Portgroup_34,3007,8
etc.
Now for the Import.
In the import script, make sure that you change the name of the vDS, ActiveUplink and the location of the CSV – So he following lines.
# Set the VDS Name to variable $vds = "dvSwitch"
# Import the CSV of VLAN IDs, Portgroups, and # of ports $vdsPortgroup = Import-Csv \path\to\New_Portgroups.csv
get-vdswitch $vdsname | Get-VDPortgroup $portgroup.pgName | Get-VDUplinkTeamingPolicy | Set-VDUplinkTeamingPolicy -UnusedUplinkPort dvUplink1, dvUplink2, dvUplink3, dvUplink4 get-vdswitch $vdsname | Get-VDPortgroup $portgroup.pgName | Get-VDUplinkTeamingPolicy | Set-VDUplinkTeamingPolicy -ActiveUplinkPort LAG
That’s it. Very straight forward set of scripts to run. I prefer to run these individually as there is the step in the middle with the csv file. Aside from that I would like to thank both Ben Liebowitz and Luc Dekens for their community support for sharing their scripts.
