Find MAC Addresses of member NICs in a Native Windows Team

This article describes how to get the MAC addresses of all member Network Interface Cards (NICs ) in Native Windows Network Teams  present in a Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 using PowerShell.

There are lot of instances where the network communications fail when we are teaming up the incorrect network interfaces. Especially when the team members are the partitions of a virtual partition capable Converged Network Adapter (CNA), we need to make sure that we are teaming up correct partitions from different physical ports for redundancy and proper VLAN traffic. In such situations, the primary troubleshooting step related to network team’s connectivity issue  is to validate the network team members.

The easiest way to ensure this is to compare the unique attributes of the partitioned interfaces with the data in the network card BIOS or out-of-band management tools (like iDRAC, ILO etc) or other baseboard management controllers.  Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of the partitioned interfaces seen by the Operating System are the easiest and reliable unique identifiers in this scenario as the names for the interfaces will be different for different network cards.

The default available option to get the member NIC’s MAC address is to use the PowerShell command Get-NetAdapter <member NIC name>. For that we have to manually find the native teams in the server, their member NICs and then the MAC addresses of the member NICs.

The following short  PowerShell script will automate this process and will list down the MAC addresses of the member NICs of all the native windows teams available in the server. The advantage with the below script is that it can be used on any Windows 2012 or Windows 2012 R2 servers without any modifications/inputs.

Script:

foreach ($i in ((Get-NetLbfoTeam).name))
{
Write-Host "`nTeam Name - "$i`n"Team Members: "
Get-NetAdapter (Get-NetLbfoTeamMember -Team $i).Name | Format-Table
}

Source TechNet

Restore from Backup Exec Retired Media

retired media

Media that has been taken out of service, usually because of an excessive number of errors. Media that is retired is available for restore jobs but not for backup jobs. Media must be retired before it can be deleted. If you want to use media that has been deleted, Backup Exec will recognize it as imported media. It must be cataloged before you can restore from it.