Managing Interfaces Through Switch Port Management

The Actions column of any Interface-related table (Ports Present, Link Changes, and Hub Locator) provides a View Interface History function for LAN interface management from the Interface Viewer.

All ports that appear in tables described in this section are a subset of all ports discovered and managed by NetMRI. Interface tables outside of the Switch Port Management feature set will include such items as trunk ports and routed ports from routers and switch routers as cataloged and described by NetMRI.

View Interface History displays the Interface Viewer in a separate browser window, which automatically displays the History page, with the most recent records at the top.

SPM port counts in interface tables include only access ports. Trunk ports and routed ports are not counted against access interface counts or against the NetMRI license. Routed ports on switch-router devices will not appear in any Switch Port Management interface counts.

In the interface history, the First Seen and Last Seen timestamps indicate the first occasion when the network switch was polled by Switch Port Management and the last occasion when the device was polled or otherwise detected on the network.

The history also shows the Device Name, along with the Interface identifier and a brief description, its MAC address, operating and administrative status, the Line Speed, and Duplex settings if known and supported.

Several SPM port control settings are also available from the Actions menu. Choosing a menu option displays a dialog for the port configuration change. You can configure the following:

• Set Admin Status: Set the port to administratively Up or administratively Down. The NetMRI Sandbox with the built-in Port Activation Perl script is required for this operation. For more information, see Using the NetMRI Sandbox.

• Edit Description: A text label describing the port in the If Description column.

• Edit VLAN Membership: This allows you to assign data and voice VLANs to an interface in order to separate data and voice traffic. You can assign VLANs of one type or both types, or disable any VLAN assignments.

To assign a VLAN, select the VLAN ID and name, and click Save. The assigned VLANs are added to the table. To disable existing VLAN assignments, select No Data VLAN or No Voice VLAN, and click Save. All VLANs of the corresponding type are removed from the table.

As NetMRI does not retrieve the VLAN type information from your devices and, therefore, does not display it in the Edit Interface VLAN Membership dialog, you may want to use meaningful names for VLANs to distinguish between data and voice types.

If the operating status of an interface is shown as “down” in the If Oper Status column, the VLAN information for this interface may be incomplete.

You can trace the path of an L3 switched VLAN using the Topology Viewer. For more information, see VLAN Tracing.

For more information, see Using the Interface Viewer.