We’re making good progress so far.  The switch is up and the legacy configuration is working again.  It was time to make some configuration decisions.  What I settled on was this topology:

I decided to allocate one pNIC for vMotion exclusively and then pile everything else on the other pNIC.  With a topology in mind, it’s time to migrate the existing port groups from the vSS instances to the vDS.  This is pretty straightforward and vCenter should take care of everything if your environment is healthy.  Head over to the Networking section to get things started.  Before we get into migration, we need to create some port groups to migrate to.  Right-click on the vDS and select “New Port Group”:

Not many options to worry about here surprisingly; just a name for the new port group and the maximum number of ports and whether or not VLAN tagging should be applied to the network:

The above procedure should be repeated until all of the port groups required for migration are in place.  Next step is to actually migrate the vSS groups.  Right-click on the vDS and select “Migrate Virtual Machine Networking”:

The first step is to choose the vSS port group to migrate and map it to a vDS port group:

Next step is to select specific virtual machines within the legacy port group, or simply select all of them.  Note that there are none showing up here because the migration was already completed by the time I remembered to take a screen grab!

With the machines selected, you can go ahead, click next, and finish the staging to start the migration.  In my case I moved 13 VMs at once and 12 of them went off without a hitch.  One failed with an obscure error indicating that attempting to move the guest caused a loss of host connectivity and so the change was rolled back.  Before attempting to figure that out I just gave it a second try and it worked immediately.  A bit concerning, but possibly just an anomaly.  Either way if this does come up, before worrying too much about it, do give the migration a second try.

With the VM Network migrated over, I dropped into the switch interface again and created VLAN support for VLAN4 (my dedicated vMotion VLAN).   The router was able to ping the hosts, so it was looking good, but the ultimate test of course is to perform the actual vMotion.  vMotion is nothing new obviously.  Right-click on a VM in a cluster and select Migrate, so we will walk through it stop motion photography style:

Poof! Like magic vMotion is working which means our VLAN configuration is functional.  Before doing a test like this be sure to deselect vMotion on any other port groups to make sure that the new dedicated port group is actually in use!