Using vSwitch CDP with HP switches
In this blog post we looked at the new support for vendor neutral discovery protocol LLDP in vSphere 5. Unfortunately LLDP is only available on the Distributed Virtal Switches and not for ordinary vSwitch.
However, for a long time we had CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) in the vSwitches, but as the name implies is a Cisco proprietary method. If running Cisco devices this is no problem, but for example HP Procurve has no full support for CDP. This means that they cannot send any CDP data, but is actually allowed to read CDP sent to them. By enabling CDP in the virtual vSwitches we could help the network administrators a lot and will ease both setup and later troubleshooting.
Enabling CDP is not hard, but must be done from the command line. Access each host through local ESXi Shell or SSH and make a note of the names of all vSwitches by running:
esxcfg-vswitch -l | grep vSwitch
--> please see the rest on the blog : http://rickardnobel.se/archives/1110