My networking skills around link aggregation and Etherchannel are not particularly robust, so I've have been researching the posts here but have not found an answer that directly relates to my questions. Network gurus, kindly offer your input for my dilemma below.
Background: There are several production vSphere 5.1 clusters, each of which consists of two ESXi hosts, and the hosts presently have correctly configured Etherchannel connectivity to the upstream Cisco switches. We are not experiencing any issues, everything performs as expected. vCenter Server 5.1 is managing all clusters, no problems there either.
We are getting ready to migrate ESXi hosts off a Windows vCenter 5.1 implementation to a new vCenter 5.5 appliance. Because we are moving to a new vCenter instance rather than upgrading an existing installation, I'm not sure how to proceed with migrating the networking, but my initial plan is to keep the Etherchannel in place until after everything is on the new vCenter. To accomplish that, my inclination right now is to configure a standard vSwitch on each host for Etherchannel connectivity, move some uplinks off the DVS and over to the vSwitch, and then migrate VM networking from the DVS to the vSwitch; lastly, I would move the remaining uplinks from the DVS to the standard vSwitches and then remove the DVS altogether.
My first question is, does it make sense to dismantle the VDS and move VM networking to identically-configured standard vSwitches as part of moving ESXi hosts to a new vCenter? What would you do?
Next question: on a host with eight uplinks configured as a single Etherchannel, can I break out four of those uplinks and move them to an identically configured standard vSwitch without losing connectivity for any VMs that might be using those uplinks? Again, what would you consider the best approach?
Finally, instead of moving four uplinks into a standard vSwitch configured for Etherchannel, what if I instead proposed removing the Etherchannel configuration from the DVS altogether, in preparation for moving the networking to standard vSwitches. Should I expect loss of network connectivity as I configure port groups away from "Route based on IP hash" to something else?
As you can tell, I'm especially interested in making "seamless" changes that will not impact network connectivity on production servers.
Any critique and advice welcomed.
Thanks,
Brian