Virtually Jason

One of my customers has asked me to help them migrate from one vCenter server to another.  In order to do this without causing interruptions, we're using ESXi servers like boats to bring the VMs from the old environment into the new one; basically the same process that I used last time a customer asked me to do this. This time, we're completing this process at many different sites and each site has many VMs that need to traverse the vCenter servers.  Since this customer doesn't yet have vSphere 6 with its inter-vCenter vMotion capability, we're left doing it the hard way.  That means doing an arduous, detail oriented, highly repetitive task... or, writing a script to do it for me. The worst part of this process comes from the VM networking.  We have to create Standard vSwitches on each ESXi host with VLAN configurations that mirror the Distributed vSwitch that belongs in the vCenter, then move all of the VMs to the appropriate Port Groups on the newly create...

As part of the ESXi vCenter Migration  that I performed recently, we had to convert the ESXi hosts back to Standard vSwitches (from the Distributed vSwitch).  The built-in Wizards make the transition from Standard to Distributed nice and easy, but I don't know of any such path for easily moving the other direction.  We determined that we'd manually create the Standard vSwitch with all of the port groups from the Distributed vSwitch... but there were about 20 port groups that needed to be transitioned for each of the hosts in the cluster.  Aside from the arduous labor involved in that process, I was concerned about typos that might be introduced by depending on manual labor to accomplish that process.  So, I wrote a quick PowerCLI script to take care of it. This script takes 3 arguments; Host, Source and Destination.  The Host is the ESXi Host on which the operation should be performed.  The Source is the Distributed vSwitch that should be copied (thi...