Determining the mac address of PRP Redbox on IvS

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Industry vSwitch (IvS) supports Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) that can be used with industrial ethernet called Profinet. To take advantage of the PRP network redundancy, the node needs to have a PRP feature and have dual network connections to LAN-A and LAN-B. For the node that doesn't have PRP capability, the device called RedBox can be a proxy of PRP. In this case, IvS needs to maintain the MAC addresses of the end device (without PRP capablity) and Redbox.

To verify the network connectivity, it is important to know the MAC address of RedBox that is associated with the node without PRP.

Environment

4.2.x

Resolution

In order to get the info, you can follow the steps below:

 - Get the MAC address of the NIC that is connected Profinet network
 - Login to the ESXi Host via SSH
 - Run and find the DvsPortset name for the MAC address

 net-stats -l

 - Run and find Switch ID (swID) for the DvsPortset

 nsxcli -c get ens switch list

 - Run and find the entry for the MAC address in the node table output

nsxcli -c get ens prp node <swID>

 - Look for the right the MAC address of the node and check the RedBoxMac field.