As we have no visibility into our corporate ITs networking configuration, we must trust that they have completely configured everything end to end successfully for any given port. We use, what I assume, is a fairly typical network configuration, at the port level...Trunk ports and VLAN tagging. In our case, we have several VLANs associated with VMs we setup. Validating each of those VLANs end to end is fairly laborious and time consuming. I'm curious how people are managing this in their world.
I know we can go to the network adapters on the hosts and view observed networks, and in the case of ESXi 5.1, the wonderful network healthcheck can make you feel warm and fuzzy about your network configuration...but even that has its limitations. I received green checks on the network healthcheck for VLANs, but a spot check of putting a server on those NICs proved that even then not all is guaranteed functioning. A quick call with my network operations confirmed that "something" was missed, and required a tweak on their end to complete this.
How are you validating network? Is it a manual process, is there a script that can help with this? We just added over 10 servers, and validating all 4-6 NICs manually seems like it would be very time consuming.