locate nic for Proliant

[Gryan_1]

we have many HP proliant servers and many PCI slots are insterted with NIC HBA. We are identifying the connection mapping from server nic to switch port. Then, we wonder whether there is a way to locate the NIC location? For example, Onboard left NIC port is connected to Gi0/0 of switch.

[Trygve Henriksen]

All Switches over a certain price range have some sort of administrative user interface(even some of the more expensive HUBs of yesteryear had this) where you can read out the MAC address of the units connected to a switch port.

Some management SW may also be able to automate the process for you.

[Gryan_1]

As you said if we know the MAC address of the unit connected to a switch port, But how to identify which server NIC is for the MAC address. For example, The MAC address connected to Gi0/0 is AB-CD-EF-GH-IJ-KR, then we want to which server NIC port has the MAC address of AB-CD-EF-GH-IJ-KR. Let's assume the server is DL385 G2 which PCI slots fully inserted with dual port NIC HBA. which nic port is for AB-CD-EF-GH-IJ-KR. Onboard Left side or PCI1 NIC Left side or others?

[Trygve Henriksen]

I'm afraid there's no easy solution, unless you happen to have SMS/SCCM(From M$) or another system that automatically gathers tons of inventory data from your machines.

Pinging a server's name or IP should reveal the MAC address belonging to it, as long as you're on the same subnet.
(just run the 'ARP -a' command in the command shell after the PING)

you can use 'IPCONFIG /ALL' and pipe the result into a file:
IPCONFIG / ALL >> network.txt
(using '>>' will add to the file, '>' will create a new file)
This will list all network cards in a machine, with complete name, IP and MAC address. (It won't tell you if the card is a built-in, PCI or even an USB-stick, but maybe you can recognise it by name?)

Run the command on all the servers and pipe the results into the same file, open it in Notepad and use the Search function.

If you have a lot of servers, consider using a batch file which reads the name of the servers from a text-file, then copies another batch-file(with the ipconfig command) to each server in turn, and set up a scheduled task to run the file.
(I leave that as an exercise. This is stuff well worth knowing how to do, and the best way of learning is trying... )