Comments on: Identifying ESX Server NICs in Blades

By: Aaron Delp

Aaron Delp — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:49:46 +0000

Julian – Full disclosure, I work with Scott (and post here sometimes) so my experience will mirror Scott’s to a large degree. Hopefully, Scott will agree with me!

If you are using FC to go to your SAN, I would consider the minimum number of Ethernet ports to be 4. If you are using IP based storage, then I would go with 6. If you are doing a large deployment, I would bump the numbers up to 6 and 8.

Take a look at this post and let me know if you have any questions:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/02/16/blades-and-virtualization-arent-mutually-exclusive-part-four-hp-traditional-expansion-options/

Thanks!

By: julianwood

julianwood — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Great information as usual.

We’re starting to trial HP blades at the moment (BL460c) and I’m trying to think how we would network ESX.

Our network guys at the moment say they see no need for virtual connect and are planning on using 2 x Cisco 3120 switches per chassis for normal servers.

For ESX servers though this is not so simple. How are people networking up blades and are you using Cisco 3120 type switches or virtual connect.

How many Nics are you putting in your ESX hosts (what extra mezzanine cards) and how are they connected up / what port groups are you creating / what traffic are you sharing and what failover decisions have you made.

Would be very interesting to get people’s opinion.

By: slowe

slowe — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:51:46 +0000

Aenagy, “esxcfg-vswitch –help” is your friend.

By: aenagy

aenagy — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:52:16 +0000

Thanks.

How do you specify recieve-only?

By: slowe

slowe — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:45:23 +0000

You have the option of enabling CDP to both send and receive CDP packets, to only receive CDP packets, or to only send CDP packets. In your case, it sounds like you may want to set it only to receive CDP packets and not send them.

By: aenagy

aenagy — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:08:42 +0000

With CDP enabled on ESX/ESXi will the host simply recieve CDP packets or will it also generate CDP packets? Our network team will veto any device generating CDP packets that they do not administer.

Thanks.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:42:36 +0000

Greetings,

Does any one know the command to disable the NIC interface using ESX command line interface.

Thanks
Ahmed

By: Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks | Colin McNamara - CCIE 18233 , RHCE, GCIH, CCVP, GEEK

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:01:56 +0000

[...] virtualization. His blog is chock full of good of information. A recent post of interest was how to enable Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) on VMware ESX server network interface cards. Share and [...]

By: slowe

slowe — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:12:42 +0000

Duane,

Ah, now I understand. At this point, you are back to the “old fashioned” way of doing it, just like you described: use VirtualConnect Manager to set the port to Unassigned and then use esxcfg-nics to see which NIC went down. I don’t know of any other way to do it. VirtualConnect does not help with the mapping of the physical NICs to the vmnics, as far as I know.

Hope this helps!

By: Duane Haas

Duane Haas — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:32:04 +0000

scott, thanks for the link. sorry my question was phrased poorly. i am trying to find out if I setup virtual connect, and i have a full height blade that has 4 internal nics, it will show me ports 1-4 on the virtual connect side in ther server profile i setup. how can i tell what virtual nics those map too? The obvious answer to me is to change each port to unassigned and watch the nics go down in esx, but if I dont want to take them down but want to understand how they map back to the port numbers in esx i cant seem to find an easy way.