New 1Gb Broadcom Multifunction Win64 driver (7.8.6.0) is buggy

[robbied31]

Thank You,

I had actually found the previous version to the one you linked to. 15.4.0.17 which has fixed my issues for now.  I will try 15.4.0.19 next.

Rob

[mpiana70]

do you manage to get it working at 1 gb ?

[stryqx]

Wish I found this two days ago...

Exact same problem  - VM to off-host traffic was all FUBAR.

After much trial and error of turning one thing off at a time and testing (all those frakking offload settings),  I've found that disabling VMQ on the Hyper-V host NICs that are physically connected and also disabling VMQ in each VM's configuration has restored performance for VM to off-host traffic.

Why HP persist with putting such cr*ppy NICs onboard their servers is beyond me.

[waaronb]

Thanks for putting in some time troubleshooting exactly where the problem is. I was too lazy to bother going through all of the (many) settings, especially knowing that it still might not work.

I guess the VMQ settings were an obvious place to look, in hindsight, since at least for me, the problems were all related to virtuals. My connection to the host machine seemed fine, but I wasn't testing that specifically. My remote desktop connection didn't seem to be suffering at any rate.

Well, this should be a good option for anyone who needed a fix from this version, so they can work around the HUGE bug it introduced. Or someone who installed this and can't roll back for some reason. It's sure a lot of work though. Still probably easier to roll back. But I'm sure HP and/or Broadcom appreciates you doing the legwork for them. :)

[ZackInMA]

I also had this issue and can confirm that rolling back the driver to version 7.4.14 did correct the issue. Thanks for posting so we could share and learn from each other's experiences. Sad but true is that we learn more from each other than the manufacturer.... 

[Tuur]

Other drivers from broadcom Multifunction driver (7.8.21.0) seems to have the same issue. Downgrading works. We had problems with Altiris PXE and SCCM PXE.

This page discripes the SCCM isssue

http://translate.google.nl/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://sebastiangrugel.blogspot.com/2013/12/downgrade-sterownikow-broadcom-hp.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3D7.8.21.0%2Bbroadcom%2Bmtu%2B1486%26biw%3D1920%26bih%3D1053

On all servers we checked had a MTU size of 1486, downgrading the driver changed de MTU size back to 1500.

Fixing the MTU size with the new driver also solved the PXE issue for us :

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface interface=<interfacename> MTU=1500

[waaronb]

I'm a little shocked that HP hasn't addressed this issue yet, considering it must be affecting a lot of customers who installed the latest driver.

So if you did (for some reason) want the latest driver installed, make sure the MTU is still 1500, and disable VMQ.  I wonder why they changed the MTU... that seems like a really strange thing to do.

Between this and their new policy that, sometime this month, you'll need an active contract or warranty to access driver downloads, I'm not enjoying the HP support experience as much lately.

Although when I need to fix some server item under warranty, they do handle that really fast.  Overnight cross shipments, and as long as I do the proper diagnostics first, they're happy to send the requested part without bothering me with questions.

So it's not all bad, but it is pretty bad when a new driver version can knock a server offline and HP doesn't even put out a notice, warning people and advising to downgrade if they run into issues?

[Oscar A. Perez]

Have you tried the new driver 7.8.50.0?
Fixes:

This driver corrects an issue that could result in halted traffic when configuring jumbo frame size to 9000.

This driver corrects an issue that could result in a Windows Stop Error (BSOD) when a large number of ports are repeatedly disabled.

http://www.hp.com/swpublishing/MTX-e28e4668ad3f4f028fdf4e802e

[waaronb]

Weird, that must have just come out?  "7.8.50.0 (B) (18 Feb 2014)"

In other news, HP invents time travel.  This version still isn't showing up, at least on the DL360 G7, Server 2012 list of software.  Which product page and OS version did you find this hidden gem? :)

The description of the fix doesn't quite sound like the problems noted in this thread, but maybe I can give it a shot over the weekend on a test system, a DL360 G7 running Server 2012, as a Hyper-V host.  This is one where I saw access to the virtual guest machines dropping network traffic left and right with the 7.8.6.0 driver.

[Oscar A. Perez]

I have a Flux Capacitor on my DeLorean :)

Let me know if it works.