Thursday, April 19, 2012

Renaming a VMware port-group on the 1000v

During the creation of vethernet port profiles on the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch you have two options for the port-group name that is pushed into vCenter. If you don't provide a name after the vmware port-group command the vethernet port profile name becomes the port group name in vCenter, or you can specify the name you want pushed to vCenter.

Your server admins may want a more specific description for the port group name than you are willing to type at the command line, and one of my co-workers pointed out today that this is easy to change.

Example 1

port-profile type vlan_10
vmware port-group
switchport mode access
switchport access vlan 10
no shutdown
state enabled

In this example the vmware port-group name that is passed into vCenter would be vlan_10. This port group name is presented to the vSphere admin when selecting the network for a new guest, we may need to present something more descriptive.

Example 2

port-profile type vlan_10
vmware port-group vlan10-GuestServers-192.168.0.1/24
switchport mode access
switchport access vlan 10
no shutdown
state enabled

We can update this on the fly by updating the vmware port-group command under the port profile. The SVS connection will push the new name into vCenter immediately.