When VDS portgroups escape...

Earlier today, I was attempting to move a couple of vSphere Distributed Switches into folders in my vCenter Networking inventory. One moved successfully, but when I tried to move the other, I was greeted with the error, "These vDSes failed to move." Descriptive, right?

Unfortunately, whilst the vDS itself didn't move, some of the portgroups it contained did. They went from being child nodes of the parent vDS to being child nodes of the folder I was trying to move the vDS into. Getting them back under their parent vDS turned out to require some slight hacking of the vCenter database, so I'm documenting what I did here in case it's helpful to anyone else.

To fix the problem, I pointed SQL Server Management Studio at the vCenter database and took a look at the [VPXV_ENTITY] table. This contains a row for every item in the vCenter inventory, together with a type ID and a parent. To find all vDS port groups, the SQL query you need is:

SELECT [ID], [NAME], [PARENT_ID] FROM [dbo].[VPX_ENTITY] WHERE [TYPE_ID] = 15

Take a look at the entities that are returned by this and compare one of the port groups correctly under the vDS to one of the escapees; you'll find that the PARENT_ID differs between the two. If you query the table for the row with ID equal to the PARENT_ID you've identified as correct, you'll find it corresponds to the folder containing the VDS, not to the VDS itself; it looks like the way that the port groups are displayed under the VDS is something handled by the vSphere client rather than something that happens by virtue of their hierarchy in the database.

You'll need to run a SQL UPDATE query to fix the rows with the wrong PARENT_ID. If all of the escaped port groups are in the same folder, you could just make a note of the corresponding PARENT_ID and run something like

UPDATE [dbo].[VPX_ENTITY] SET [PARENT_ID] = <CORRECT_PARENT_ID> WHERE [TYPE_ID] = 15 and [PARENT_ID] = <INCORRECT_PARENT_ID>

updating the correct and incorrect parent IDs as appropriate. If not, make a list of the IDs and run something like

UPDATE [dbo].[VPX_ENTITY] SET [PARENT_ID] = <CORRECT_PARENT_ID> WHERE [ID] IN (id1, id2, id3...)

updating the correct parent ID and entity IDs as appropriate. Once you've done this, you'll need to restart the VMware VirtualCenter service on your vCenter server.

By the way, the root cause of the original problem turns out to be that one of the existing VDSes in the folder I was trying to move it to had a port group defined with the same name as a port group on the new VDS. As we've seen from the database structure, the portgroup entities are children of the vDS's parent folder, not the vDS itself, so I'm surmising that the client got part-way through moving the port groups of the moving vDS, hit a name collision with a port group on the existing vDS in the folder and failed to clean up after itself properly!