While migrating VM’s between a 6.0 and 6.5 vCenter, I came across an error that stopped the migrations from happening. The error was “The destination distributed switch has a different version or vendor than the source distributed switch“.

Comparing the vDS on both vCenters, they appeared to be the same version and both were using VMware’s own vDS. No Nexus 1000’s here!

After digging deeper, I found that the source vCenter vDS had a vendor of “VMware“. The destination vCenter vDS had a vendor of “VMware, Inc.” which matched https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2126851

While KB2126851 only mentions the 5.x versions of vCenter, my source had been upgraded in-place and so had kept the old 5.x vendor name. As I was going to decommission this vCenter, I didn’t want to risk any further issues that would impede the migration and so decided against the changes suggested in KB2126851.

It turns out that William Lam has blogged about a similar issue with differing vDS versions when migrating on-prem to cloud. The vCenter Advanced Setting from his post also worked for my vendor mismatch!

This change needs to be done on both vCenters if you need to migrate in both directions.

1. Login to your vCenter Server web client
2. High-light your vCenter Server name in the left-hand column and then click on the Configure tab on the right
3. Go to Advanced Settings and click on Edit Settings
4. At the bottom of the pop-up window, add the following property in the Name section: config.migrate.test.NetworksCompatibleOption.AllowMismatchedDVSwitchConfig
5. Set the value to true
6. Click Add then click Save