How to find the port using MAC address.. ESXi

[Hassan Chalabi]

Hi,

I have a VMhost connected to switch and the host VMNIC is on the standby, I have the mac address for that NIC, no traffice is flowing, no IP address is assigned to that NIC, show mac add add xxxx.xxxx.xxxx doesnt show anything..... 

can I send a broadcast mac req from the switch to all ports?

PS: this is production, service can not be intrupted, i dont want to unplug cable from the host.

Thanks

[Richard Bradfield]

I assume if the VMNIC is in standby you wo't see its MAC address on the switch, I assume the port on the switch is up and up. I don't think it will respond till it becomes active

[Hassan Chalabi]

is there a way to make the switch request for the mac? or make the vmnic send the mac to the switch?

Thanks Sir

[Richard Bradfield]

I don't think so while it is in standby, but I am no VMware expert

[Ganesh Hariharan]

Hello Hassan,

If you just want to see the mac address of the stanby VNIC, you can ask VM adminstrator to check and let you know what mac is genrated for the VM in ESXi host.

Hope it Helps..

-GI

Rate if it Helps..

[Masoud Pourshabanian]

Hello,

I am not sure what is the purpose of doing that. You can use packet generators to send packets/frames to a specific IP or MAC.

if switch receives a frame with uknown destination,  it broadcasts it to all interfaces, so VMware will receive the frame, but I am not sure if VMware replies or not.

Take a look a the link below. Download link is at the end of the page. Use it with wireshark to check the generated frames.

http://ostinato.org/downloads.html#windows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On64lQYEFlY

Masoud