Enterprise Networking Question

[adman29]

Hey Everyone,

Quick question, but is there an easy way to figure out the physical port that's been given a certain NIC designation? In VMWare, it's designated as NIC-5, but that means nothing to us -- the NIC's aren't labeled.

[leadeater]

NICs are normally grouped by MMU/PCIe device paths so if you have 2 dual port NICs the NIC in the lowest PCIe slot group number will be NIC1 & 2. Typically I just plug a cable in and look at which port went to active as it's pretty quick to do so and you can use that to figure out the port grouping and numbering, just cross check everything against MAC addresses.

 

Example server which has an onboard quad port 1Gb NIC and 2 PCIe dual port nics normally results in NIC1-4 being the onboard, NIC5&6 being the first PCIe NIC and NIC7&8 being the second PCIe NIC.

[adman29]

I hope that's it. We have an issue where all of the cables are plugged into all of the NICs and if we unplug one cable it's going to take the whole production environment offline. I'm going to try looking at it that way with the MAC addresses.

[leadeater]

12 hours ago, adman29 said:

I hope that's it. We have an issue where all of the cables are plugged into all of the NICs and if we unplug one cable it's going to take the whole production environment offline. I'm going to try looking at it that way with the MAC addresses.

That sounds odd, normally you'd be running NIC teaming so this isn't a problem. That's a lot of individual network connections, hard to think of many reasons why it would be setup that way over teaming and VLANs.