Recently I worked on a customer engagement where I installed NSX-T into their environment. After the installation, a migration needed to be done from the VSS port groups (VLAN backed) to the NSX-T Segments (VLAN backed).
This customer initially did not intend to use the distributed routing features from NSX-T. The hosts were prepped with the NSX bits to be able to configure an N-VDS to the host. The use case for this was micro-segmentation with vRealize Network Insight.
I am not covering the initial steps which I needed to perform in detail, since I want to share the script that I used for the virtual machines instead of explaining the whole migration plan.
High over the following steps were performed;
- Install NSX-T Manager
- Add Compute Manager (vCenter)
- Create two transport node profiles
- 1-PNIC-Migration-TN-Profile (only configure 1 vmnic to the N-VDS, the other ‘leg’ is still on the VSS)
- 2-PNIC-Final-TN-Profile (both vmnics are configured on the N-VDS, this profile is applied after the Virtual Machine migration)
- Create migration script;
- Apply final Transport Node Profile (requires maintenance mode per ESXi host)
The customer had to migrate approximately 3000 VMs in different batches and timeframes. The script I wrote is levering a single *.csv file with only VM names like this;
vmname
example-vm1
example-vm2
example-vm3
..
..
##You can add as many if-else statements here as you need. In my original script, I had 30 of them since I had 30 source port groups to migrate from
PORTGROUPNAME = Name of VSS based Portgroup on ESXi host
##
source:
vmware.com
versions:
vSphere 6.5 U3
NSX-T 2.5.1
PowerCLI: 10+
If you have any questions or remarks, feel free to reach out!
Awesome script and work Wesley!
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Hello Wesley,
just curious, were in the case you mentioned only N-VDS segments used at the end? So all migrated VSS portgroups were removed? I´m thinking whether there is an overhead when using NSX-T segments compared to traditional VDS portgroups when not using NSX-T features.
Thank.
Martin
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Hi Martin,
In this case almost all VSS port groups were removed. There is no real overhead using VLAN backed NSX-T segments compared to traditional VDS.VSS Portgroups. In the end it is also a port group with just a VLAN ID.
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Do we need to mirror all NSXV port groups on NSXT Switch or just Portgroups will be managed by NSXT firewall rules?
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Nowadays you can enforce NSX-T Firewall rules onto Portgroups on a VDS with vSphere 7.0 and above.
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