Matching up Physical NIC's with VMNIC's

[void269]

For some odd reason when we built our ESX 3.5 hosts, the first physical NIC didn't become the first VMNIC (i have seen this a few time but thought nothing of it until now). We have just received two new Cisco switches and are in the process of cutting over. However before we do this, we must figure out which of the physical NIC's on the Hosts are teamed. Each Host has 6x NIC's (2x on board and 2x PCI's with 2x on each) and were teamed by their VMNIC name (2x NIC's for VMotion, 2x NIC's for VMNetwork and 2x NIC's for VConsol). So now I need to know which of the physical NIC's go together.

I have run the command esxcfg-nics -l to list all the info for the NIC's, and all I have to go off of is the PCI address of the NIC. What I need to know is if my thinking is correct that the lower the PCI number, the low the physical NIC number.

So according to my attached print screen my NIC's would match up like so...

On Board NIC's

PCI Address = Physical NIC#

03:00.00 = 0

06:00.00 = 1

PCI NIC's

PCI Address = Physical NIC#

1c:00.00 = 2

1c:00.01 = 3

24:00.00 = 4

24:00.01 = 5

Thanks in advance!

[jcwuerfl]

With 3.5 I believe they added theCisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) support. So in Virtual Center since you mentioned vMotion assuming you have that running. You can click on the host, then click on configuration and networking. Then to the right of the network card there is a box you can click that will tell you the Cisco Switch and Port number you are connected to, from there you could trace it back to the port on your host so you know exactally what vmnic, ethernet port and physical port those uplinks are connected to. failing that, you could put it into maint. mode and unplug each port and do a esxcfg-nics -l and that should show you UP/DOWN on each port so you can also tell which one each is connected to. So hopefully one of those will help.

[void269]

We experimented with various methods, but in the end, this is the one that worked the best. Thanks for the post!