Whilst distributed switches are mostly configured through vCenter, there are a number of commands that can be used via an ESXi host’s CLI to display and alter vDS configuration (although these are limited to adding and removing uplinks). I’ve written about configuring host networking using esxcli here, so will focus on the esxcfg-* commands in this post.
To view information on the all the vSwitches on a given host you can use:
# esxcfg-vswitch -l DVS Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks dvSwitch 256 3 256 1500 vmnic9,vmnic8 DVPort ID In Use Client 0 1 vmnic8 1 1 vmnic9
The esxcfg-vswitch commands relating directly to operations on a dvSwitch are:
-P|--add-dvp-uplink=uplink Add an uplink to a DVPort on a DVSwitch.
Must specify DVPort Id.
-Q|--del-dvp-uplink=uplink Delete an uplink from a DVPort on a DVSwitch.
Must specify DVPort Id.
-V|--dvp=dvport Specify a DVPort Id for the operation.
The output above shows that vmnic8 and vmnic9 are being used as uplinks on the dvSwitch. If we wanted to remove vmnic9 from the switch we could run:
# esxcfg-vswitch -Q vmnic9 -V 1 dvSwitch
Listing the host’s vSwitche’s now shows that vmnic9 isn’t being used as an uplink on the dvSwitch:
# esxcfg-vswitch -l DVS Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks dvSwitch 256 2 256 1500 vmnic8 DVPort ID In Use Client 0 1 vmnic8 1 0
To add vmnic9 back as an uplink, run:
# esxcfg-vswitch -P vmnic9 -V 1 dvSwitch
Listing the vSwitches again shows that vmnic9 is now being used as an uplink on the dvSwitch once again:
# esxcfg-vswitch -l DVS Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks dvSwitch 256 3 256 1500 vmnic9,vmnic8 DVPort ID In Use Client 0 1 vmnic8 1 1 vmnic9