Dell 1U Rackmount LED Console - Manual (Page 4)

Names to Consistent Device Names for Ethernet Devices in Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® v6
4
Introduction
Network device names in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Ethernet devices have traditionally followed the
ethN naming scheme. In large deployments, the number of devices with eth names and their mapping
to physical ports can be overwhelming and inconsistent with hardware peripheral’s locations and
changes.
Dell, in collaboration with the Linux community and major distribution vendors introduced a more
consistent (predictable) and meaningful naming scheme for Ethernet devices. The new name indicates
the physical location of the Ethernet port in the system. For details on how this works, see the white
paper,
Consistent Network Device Naming in Linux .
This white paper assists you with migrating network device names of existing systems from the
traditional ethN naming to the new consistent emX naming scheme. The document covers both the
migration and the upgrade cases.
Distributions
While most of the procedures described here can be applied to any Fedora
TM
-like distribution, the focus
is on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6 distribution. The document guides existing RHEL 6.X installations
that use the ethN names to upgrade/migrate to the new naming scheme making sure network
configurations and policies are not lost.
Pre-requisites
Hardware/Firmware Consistent device naming is dependent on the system’s firmware providing
the physical NIC port’s location details to the operating system. Dell
TM
PowerEdge TM 11 th Generation servers and later ship with a system BIOS that
provides the information used by the operating system to rename the
interfaces. Make sure that the Dell PowerEdge server on which you perform
the migration/upgrade actions contains support for this feature.
Software Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.1 is the minimum version that contains
support for the new naming scheme. More specifically, the primary package
requirement is biosdevname-0.3.6-11.el6 or later.
In this document, we describe migrating/upgrading from a Source version of the distribution, which can
be any Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.X using the traditional eth naming scheme to a destination
using the emX naming scheme. The destination version of the distribution that is being migrated to
must be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 or later.
Note: When upgrading from any update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to a newer one, the Ethernet
device names are not affected and are the same device names as the ones before the upgrade. When
performing a fresh install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 or later, the new naming scheme is used by
default provided the hardware/firmware pre-requisites are met.