Understanding VMware Virtual Nics to Physical Nics on a Dell M1000e

Hi,

After a fair amount of googling and no good answers as to how to the physical to virtual nic configuration between VMware and our Dell M1000e chassis, the blades and the M6220 power connect switches work we made a call to support at Dell and got our questions answered. This post is going to highlight and try and re-explain what Michael Daniels in the alternate OS support explained.

In figure 1 below you can see the view from the dell chassis management. The 3 blades we are working with are the ones I have identified as ESX1, ESX2 and ESX3. Notice they are full height blades this has an impact when it comes to the number of NICS that are available on each blade. Each one of these 3 blades has 1 ethernet mezzanine card installed in the B fabric slot and 1 Fiber card installed in the C fabric slot.

Figure 1.

Moving on to look at the details of the blade in slot 1 you can see I have it selected and currently have the properties of that blade displayed. The important thing to note in this are the MAC addresses and how they relate to the fabrics. This is what you will need if you need to make a one to one correlation of physical blade ports to virtual nics. From this view you can also tell the since it is a full height blade it has ports tied to both slot 1 and slot 9 on the chassis. VMware sees no distinction in these ports, they are simply more virtual nics.

Figure 2

In figure 3 below, which I apologize for being so little, you can the network adapter configuration of what I called ESX1. This view shows the mac addresses that each virtual nic is connected to. These mac addresses will match up with the mac addresses in figure to which is how you can identify what nic goes to what fabric.

Figure 3.

Based on this pictures and comparing MAC addresses we can create the following list of what ports connect to where.

VMware adapter Fabic MAC

vmnic0 A1-slot1 00:21:9B:FE:32:F8

vmnic1 A2-slot1 00:21:9B:FE:32:FA

vmnic2 A1-slot9 00:21:9B:FE:32:FC

vmnic3 A2-slot9 00:21:9B:FE:32:FE

vmnic4 B1-slot1 00:10:18:3B:83:2C

vmnic5 B2-slot1 00:10:18:3B:83:2E

As an additional help in visualizing how things work figure 4 is a screenshot of the Dell Powerconnect M6220. This particular switch is the one in the A1 fabric. From this view you can see the internal and external ports on the switch. Our ESX1 server would have vmnic0 mapped to port g1 and vmnic2 mapped to port g9.

Figure 4

Hopefully this article helped to clear up and answer what virtual nic relates to what physical nic in VMware. Coming soon I will discuss the process we used to configure the ports and vlans in the switches and how based on that to setup a distributed switch in VMware with ESX hosts attached.

Dell Powerconnect M6220 Default password

So in the process of trying to configure the networking on your dell blades to support LAG groups, I screwed up the service console port. This made all ESX hosts unable to be reached. Trying to edit the group and get back to simple default config wasn't working and I figured it was easier to restore to factory default.

On the M6220 switch I ran the clear config command which blew away everything and my ESX hosts were much happier. Unfortunately I was unable to connect to the switch and nowhere on the web could I find the username and password information. It ended up that this is because it deletes the users, including the root username and password. You also will not be able to reset the password back to what it came as from dell because their password is less then 8 characters

Solution:

After a quick call to support we have the solution, you need to access the cmc from either a telnet or SSH session. You may have to enable telnet if you want to use that; it was turned off by default on our system. You will login to a $ prompt.

Type connect switch-# where our number was 1 because we were working with fabric A1.

This will bring you into the switch where you can escalate to enable mode with en.

To recreate the root account go into config mode and run a username root password {password} level 15.

Be sure to exit out of config and copy your running configuration to the startup config so you do lose the username again. You should now be back in business.

Starting of something new

Hi,

So we are creating this blog as a sort of documentation process for both ourselves and others we go through the progress of migrating to a virtualized environment. Particularly because we have become frustrated sorting through the huge amount of documentation that exists within all the various vendors to try to get everything to tie together. Our goal will be to list hardware along with the steps and screenshots of those steps of what we do as we do it to get things up and working. We hope this helps others who might follow to do this faster and more efficiently than we did.