While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.
An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.
A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.
Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.
Option 1:
- Source: vCenter: 7.x & ESX: 7.x with VDS 7.0
- Destination: vCenter 9.x & ESX 9.x with VDS 7.0
If you have some spare or swing ESX hosts at the destination location, you can configure it with lower VDS version and perform Cross vCenter vMotion without encountering VDS compatibility issues.
Option 2:
- Source: vCenter: 7.x & ESX: 7.x with VDS 7.0
- Destination: vCenter 9.x & ESX 9.x with VDS 9.0
If you do not have additional hosts that can match the source VDS version, when you attempt to perform a Cross vCenter vMotion, you will run into the following compatibility issue:
The target host does not support the virtual machine's current hardware requirements. The destination virtual switch version or type (VDS 9.0.0) is different than the minimum required version or type (VDS 7.0.3) necessary to migrate VM from source virtual switch.
Luckily, this problem had already been solved back in 2018, enabling workload mobility between an on-premises vSphere envrionment and VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) deployment, which will have different VDS version.
I recently spoke to VCF product management to get clarity on KB 318582 which utilizes the same solution to allow a Cross vCenter vMotion of a VM between two different VDS version.
The KB will be updated shortly to remove the VMC-A specific support text and while vSphere 7.0 is still EOS, for this use case, you will be able to leverage this exact same solution to move workloads from a vSphere 7.0 environment to VVF/VCF 9.0.
Thanks for the comment!