Find MAC address for lost VMs

[dylan.ebner]

This may not be possible, but here's hoping.

My VMware environment is 100% Cisco UCS B servers. I had an incident recently where our ESXi host servers became disconnected from our vCenter Server. Now per VMware support we need to shutdown the guest VMs and then reboot the hosts. The problem is, we don't know which VMs are running on which host because of DRS. To make matters worse, SSH and the console are diabled on the ESXi hosts so we can't log into them and check and we can't use vmfstools to find the lock holder either.

Years ago before UCS when our ESX hosts were directly connected to our switches we had a similar issue and we found  the ESX host of the vms by doing a dump of MAC addresses on our switches. Can this be done on the FICs? 

Thanks

[balaji.bandi]

FIC Still connected to Layer 2 Device you have MAC Address populated, which associated on your Layer 2 device.

So get IP arp where Layer 3 configured based on the VLAN, Get MAC Address from Layer 2 device, and compare.

so you have all the databases.

[dylan.ebner · Accepted solution]

Hi BB-

The FIC is the layer 2 device and I was looking for the command to get the MAC address table out of the FICs. I found it by connecting to the local-mgmt of the FIC and then I could run a show mac-address-table.