If you don’t have licensing for distributed switches in vCenter adding portgroups to a new host or a new cluster can be super time consuming in the UI BUT thankfully VMWare has had mercy on us and provided comandlets to use Powershell to add portgroups to VMWare hosts. This is a script I use a lot to add portgroups to hosts and it is way faster and way less painful than doing it by hand so… enjoy! For PowerCLI setup and connecting to vCenter see this post.

Script:

#Check for Creds and ask for them if they aren't found
if (!($Creds)) {$creds = get-credential -Message "Enter your vCenter Creds"}
#Change these to your values
$vSwitchName = "vSwitch_Name"
$PortgroupName = "Name_of_Portgroup"
$VLanId = "123"
$vCenter_Server = "vCenter_Server_Name"
$Hosts = (
    "Host1",
    "Host2",
    "host3"
)

#Connect to vCenter
Connect-VIServer -server $vCenter_Server -Credential $creds -force

foreach ($Host in $Hosts) {
    #Adds portgroup to host
    get-vmhost -Name $Host | get-virtualswitch -name $vSwitchName |  New-VirtualPortGroup -name $PortgroupName -VLanId $VLanId
}