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.
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