We are implementing a vSphere farm and are using a distrubuted switch. The VC is a VM within the farm connected to the distrubuted switch. We had a SAN issue and all of our VMs were down. When the SAN recovered and we restarted the ESX host containing the VC the VC couldn't connect to the network through the vDS. We had to remove a NIC from the vDS on that host and create a regular vswitch and then connect the VC to that before the VC would connect to the network.

Is this typical behavior? If the VC goes down does all vDS networking stop on all the hosts? That seems to be a very bad thing. I thought networking would work even though the VC is down because the hosts have the vDS configuration cached. Is there a better way to configure it to prevent this from happening. We want to keep the VC as a VM for HA and recoverabilty purposes. Can anyone offer suggestions or explanations?

I appreciate the help.

Thanks,

Rick