I've never used a dvswitch before, but I think I am at the point of needing one. Right now, I have a cluster with 6 hosts, all 5.1 (not U1). Each has just standard vswitches defined (one for Management, one for vMotion, another for VM use). That last vswitch uses a pair of NICs based on a QLogic 10G card (same 2 port card in each host). This NIC has given us nothing but trouble (even on Windows). So now I have a new 2 port 10G NIC, based on an Emulex card.
So what I have is a vswitch with vmnic0 and vmnic1 (now down, as I moved the 10G fiber cables to the new NIC). And I have 2 unassigned NICs - vmnic8 and vmnic9. So I want to do is:
Create a new dvswitch; create the 7 dvportgroups I want (one for each VLAN in use). Since each host will eventually get these same 2 new vmnics, I will assign 2 uplinks. I want to define this dvswitch, have it use the 2 new NICs, and then add all the hosts to it, so if I ever add a new host, I don't have to define a new dvswitch.
What I don't understand is how to assign the VMs to use the new dvswitch? Right now, I just create the VM, assign it a VLAN, and let the host figure it out. How will this work with the dvswitch? I won't need to delete the standard vswitch first, will I?
Any advice appreciated.