That’s what I thought at first, why do I need CDP(Cisco Discovery Protocol)? Well yesterday CDP proved to be an excellent option for troubleshooting weird networking problems. One of my customers replaced a faulty NIC and accidentally switched two network cables. One of these cables was part of an etherchannel, this caused all kind of strange routing / connection errors to the virtual machines. CDP was very useful because I could setup a remote connection to the customer and check which vmnic was connected to which port on the switch. So use CDP when in doubt!
Click on the blue cloud next to the vmnic name on the right:
This is the result:
(Screenshots taken from the RTFM Upgrade Guide.)
I was excited to see that VMware had added CDP to ESX 3.5, and for all the reasons you just discovered for yourself.
Your timing, Duncan, is just unbelievable. I was just considering doing a brief write-up of CDP and why it’s beneficial and then I see this! This is probably the second or third time it’s happened. Keep up the good work.