Issue with Broadcom NIC drivers in SPP 2013-02-0b

[zeroagemain]

We've resolved this so just posting in case anyone else has the issue.

After a recent upgrade of blade servers to SPP 2013-02-0b we started to experience serious domain wide issues that we tied down to a domain controller that could no longer pass network traffic consistently. BL460c G6 running Windows Server 2008 x64. The intermittent nature of it made it very hard to diagnose.

In the end we found it to be the combination for firmware and driver (Broadcom 10Gbe Multifunction) in 2013-02-0b, as it worked OK if we rolled both back to 2012-10-0 (but oddly not if we just rolled the driver back - the NIC's failed completely then) and also if we rolled forward to 2013-09-0.

I should add that we are successfully using the 2013-02-0b NIC fware/drivers on most other systems without issues, but on this particular system it just wouldn't work. We even tried re-installing once we knew the cause in case it was a faulty install but it happened again so we've settled on 2013-09-0 now.

[zeroagemain]

By way of an update this turned out not to be limited to that one system but actually affected many of the systems upgraded.

Knowing the fix above made it quick for us to repair on those extra systems though, but these seem like seriously problem drivers.