The procedure is quite straightforward:
- Right-click on the distributed vSwitch and select Add and Manage hosts.
- Select which hosts will be connected to the distributed vSwitch. ESXi hosts can be connected to multiple distributed switches:
- In Manage physical adapters, you need to assign which physical network interface cards of the ESXi host will be connected to the distributed vSwitch.
- You have two options here:
- Manual assignment of all pNICs of all ESXi servers
- Template mode
With the manual assignment, you need to select every single pNIC you would like to connect to the ESXi server. To do so, select pNIC and click assign:
Depending on your configuration of the vDS and the number of configured uplinks, you will have the possibility to select to which logical uplink the pNIC will be assigned.
Once the assignment is done, you will see how the pNICs will be assigned:
With template mode, you can speed up the operation a bit, but keep in mind that you need the same environment (concerning the number of pNICs in each server you are connecting with the same configuration on the physical switches).
In template mode, you can check Apply this uplink assignment to the rest of the hosts, as shown in the following screenshot:
In this case, every single pNIC vmnic6 will be assigned as an Uplink1 for all ESXi hypervisors.
- Next, you can automatically migrate your VMkernel networking from the standard virtual switch to the new distributed one. At this stage no distributed port groups were created so we can skip this option.
- In the last step, you have an option to migrate the VM networking.
Once the host is connected to the distributed vSwitch, you will see it in the Overview tab of the distributed vSwitch:
