DL380p-Gen8: correlate physical port to windows server 2012 device information

[Rob Urban]

Hi Folks,

a customer in another country has a DL380p-Gen8 which has a 4-port Ethernet controller, the Broadcom 331FLR.

According to the  "Device Manager", the ports have the following properties:

Adapter  PCI-Bus  Device  Function
-------  -------  ------  --------
(blank)  3        0       2
#2       3        0       0
#3       3        0       3
#4       3        0       1

I need to tell someone exactly which port on the back to stick a cable into. How can I correlate the controller to a particular physical slot, looking at the system from the rear, and how can I correlate the adapter numbers to the physical ports on the card?

thanks,

Rob

[waaronb]

I've always had this problem too... trying to figure out how the Windows NIC assignments correlate with the physical NIC ports.

It's important to me because I run each of our production servers to diverse switches for redunancy... knowing which NIC in Windows goes to which switch matters for monitoring, balancing loads, etc.

My best guess is to look at the MAC address.  I *think* that HP assigns the lowest MAC address to the port labeled #1 on the back, and they go up from there.  But I don't know that for sure.

It's kind of a goofy solution but sometimes I"ll unplug each port and see which NIC says it was disconnected in Windows, then I rename each one to LAN #1 through LAN #4.

I hate that there's no actual link between the port #'s on the back and what Windows shows.  It's been a pain for me since day one, but it's not just HP, it's any system with multi-port network cards.  Windows seems to do it randomly.  You could do the same install on the same system twice and it would match them up differently each time I think. LOL

Maybe not... maybe there's some method based on the vendor ID substrings, but it bugs me.