vSphere Distributed Switch Part 11 – Export Distributed Switch Configuration

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Welcome back to Distributed Switch Series of posts. This post is to explain you the step by step procedure to export the vSphere distributed switch configuration using vSphere Web Client. With this option, your vSphere distributed switch configuration will be exported to compressed file. This file preserves the network configurations of your distributed switch. Which can be used as backup or can be used for other dvswitch deployments. This Export feature is only available with vSphere Web client 5.1 or later but you can export the settings of distributed switch of any version if you use the vSphere web client (5.1 or later).

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Login to your vCenter server using vSphere web client. and Browse towards your dvswitch. Select your dvswitch. Click on Actions tab->All vCenter Actions  and select Export Configuration

Select the option whether you want to export the configuration of “Distributed Switch and Port Groups” or only Distributed Switch only”. Enter the description for this dvswitch configuration export and click on Ok.

In Confirm Configuration Export option, Click on Yes to save the exported file to your local disk.  Browse the location to save in your local disk and click on ok.
I have saved the exported file called “dvswitch-backup-9-jan-14”. Which is a compressed file. Upon extraction, I can see 2 folders inside the exported file. 2 folders are “Data” and “META-INF”.
Under Data folder, I can see 3 .bak files. one for my dvswitch (Dswitch-Development) , one file for my dv port groups (DportGroup) and one for my uplink group (DSwitch-Development-DVUplinks-522)
Another folder called META-INF. Which contains a file called data.xml file. 

Below is the content of data.xml file. If you try to reda the file. You can easily identify the details about about the configuration exort. This xml file contains details about the below items

  • Distributed switch name along with uuid (Universally Unique Identifier).The ID can be 48 alphanumeric characters.
  • Description about this dvswitch configuration export and date&time of creation
  • Version of dvswitch, dvswitch id,Uplink information,uuid, dvswitch name, vlan information and also pointer to backup file (d98a 1a 50 16 12 01 6e-12 1a 2f f1 77 9f 50 16.bak) of dvswitch in Data folder
  • dvport group id, name, vlan information, port binding and allocation information along with pointer to backup file(dvportgroup-523.bak & dvportgroup-524.bak) of dvport group in Data folder

I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for reading!!!. Be Social and share it in social media, If you feel worth sharing it.