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!

I’m not sure I understand your question. Internal connections from the blades to the VC switches are determined by the port mapping, which is a fixed pathing that says NIC 1 on blade 1 goes here, NIC 2 goes here, etc.

From there, VirtualConnect Manager lets you define profiles that determine on a per-slot basis which NICs connect to which networks and which networks run over which uplinks.

I wrote an article about using VirtualConnect with ESX here:

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1295274,00.html

Hope this helps!

Be careful. I may have to replace Google with your website when searching for answers to all of my VMWare related network questions.

I can’t tell you how happy this features makes me. I spent nearly a day tracing wires from NIC’s to switch to create a network diagram for our VMWare environment. Even though I have already done that work, I appreciate having CDP available.