This post is a quasi update to a post that I originally made just over a month ago. The original post is below…

Mapping nic hardware address to PCI address

Well I have found another useful bit of information hidden deep within the bowels of the ESX configuration. Stumbled across /proc/vmware/pci while trying to track down a flaky hba using the command below.

cat /proc/vmware/pci | grep vmhba

Well change this to…

cat /proc/vmware/pci | grep vmnic

… and you get a nice clean list of your network adapters, minus hardware addreseses.

003:00.0 14e4:164c 103c:7038 Ethernet
Broadcom  5/ 16/0x79 A V bnx2     vmnic1
005:00.0
14e4:164c 103c:7038 Ethernet Broadcom  7/ 17/0x81 A V
bnx2     vmnic2
013:00.0 8086:10bc 103c:704b Ethernet
Intel    10/ 19/0x91 B V e1000   
vmnic0
013:00.1 8086:10bc 103c:704b Ethernet Intel    10/
18/0x89 A V e1000    vmnic3
014:00.0 8086:10bc 103c:704b
Ethernet Intel     7/ 17/0x81 B V e1000   
vmnic4
014:00.1 8086:10bc 103c:704b Ethernet Intel     5/
16/0x79 A V e1000    vmnic5
017:00.0 8086:10bc 103c:704b
Ethernet Intel     5/ 16/0x79 B V e1000   
vmnic6
017:00.1 8086:10bc 103c:704b Ethernet Intel    10/
19/0x91 A V e1000    vmnic7
018:00.0 8086:10bc 103c:704b
Ethernet Intel    10/ 18/0x89 B V e1000   
vmnic8
018:00.1 8086:10bc 103c:704b Ethernet Intel     7/
17/0x81 A V e1000    vmnic9

Looking at the list above I can quickly see which two nics are my onboard Broadcoms (on my HP DL380g5). Now I can isolate vmnic1 from vmnic2 using the ethtool command to make the lights on each port blink on and off. In the example below I will make vmnic1 blink for 20 seconds.

ethtool -p vmnic1 20

Note that I have not found it particularly easy to identify which port is blinking, due to the fact that all my ports are binking in one way or another. I recommend getting a good look at the ports before you run ethtool, and then run it and look again. The comparison makes it easier to identify said port.