Quick way to name your NICs in Windows Servers

If you, like me, manage many servers, it’s essential to name network adapters in a way that makes it easy to troubleshoot issues when they arise.

In complex networks with thousands of servers and all servers connected using multiple paths a consistent naming standard is very important!

PowerShell and the cmdlets available in Windows Server makes naming adapters a breeze. The servers we usualy deploy have built in four (4) port network adapters. We like to name the Windows NICs the same as is the default in Linux; eth0, eth1, etc.

In the following example we name the adapters eth0, eth1, eth2 and eth3 in Windows. The NIC with the lowest MAC address gets the name eth0 etc. (If you prefer to to start naming adapters from eth1 change the variable $NICs to 0):

$NICs = -1
Get-NetAdapter Etherne* | Sort-Object MacAddress | % { Rename-NetAdapter -InterfaceAlias $_.InterfaceAlias -NewName eth$NICs }

PowerShell really makes life easy 😉