vSphere Upgrade: Migrating to Ephemeral dvSwitch Portgroups

There are two ways to solve the issues with dvSwitches I spoke about before. The first is to place vCenter onto an administrative per host vSwitch. The second is to create new dvSwitch portgroups but first ensure the portgroup is marked as ephemeral. But if you already have portgroups, how would you migrate from one portgroup to these ephemeral portgroups. In theory, ephemeral ports do not require vCenter to be active in order for a port assignment to take place. So how do you migrate from Static dvSwitch portgroups to Ephemeral dvSwitch portgroups?

It sounds like a difficult process but all in all it was not. All I did, as per Figure 1 was to add a new portgroup with a different naming convention and make it an Ephemeral port binding portgroup. Then all there was to do was to migrate the VMs from the old port-group to the new port-group.

In theory this should be all I need to avoid the issues with the default static binding. Such as not Failing-Safe but failure to boot VMs when vCenter is no longer around.

An alternative was to create an administrative regular vSwitch per node, which you can see in Figure 1, is the approach I originally took. But given that I like alternatives, this is definitely one method to take. In a resent reboot of my blade servers OA, this approach seems to work just fine for those VMs already switched over, but then again I do ensure vCenter and those VMs it requires boot first on a standard vSwitch. So I have not lost any functionality, but have gain some if vCenter is not running for any reason.