Identifying Where FEX Ports Go

[nstahl2124]

Hi!

I am currently a student working for my university in their Networking Department. My current project is documenting our data center. We have 2 Nexus 5596's and 6 FEXs. The FEXs then go to several ESMs that we have in the data center. I was able to use CDP to identify some ports and where they go (from the Nexus to the other devices) and then looking at the config to see what ports on the Nexus go to which FEX. But I can't figure out how I can tell what FEX ports go to which ESM ports. CDP showed what port on the Nexus goes to which ESM and it's corresponding port, but I need to find out what FEX it goes to, then what FEX port goes to what ESM and it's port. Not sure if this makes sense or not.

Thanks for the help!

-Noah

[Reza Sharifi]

Hi,

Yes, what you are asking makes sense.  CDP works only between Cisco devices but not between Cisco and and other vendors servers.  You would have to work with the server team that manage the ESMs to figure this out. You can find the MAC address of the server on the switch port and than ask the server guys what server that port connect to and than document it or put a description on the switch port connecting to the server.

HTH

[nstahl2124]

Thank you so much for your help Reza! I did know that CDP was Cisco only, "CISCO discovery protocol" haha. But I didn't know if there was some command I didn't know that would give me the ports. One of my other co-workers did find the mac addresses the ESMs were using and we were able to find which ESM was what on the rack based on that. We need to wait until our Server Admin gets back to help us with this. He was the one who did the cabling and configuration for them. 

Once again thank you very much for the help!

-Noah

[Reza Sharifi]

Glad to help Noah!

Good luck with you studies at the university.

Reza