Broadcom BMC57810 10g with ESX 4.1u3

[nimble-admin47]

Ryan Troy (Ryan Troy) asked that I share this in case someone happens to run into it.

I had a scenario with a customer using brand new supermicro servers with Broadcom BMC57810 10g nics. They were having network performance issues to the point the interfaces were only performing around 10-30mb/s.  The issue ended up being old bnx2 drivers (version 1.72.54.v41.1) present in ESX 4.1u3, I'm not sure if this applies to ESXi 5.x they didn't have a server to test on. The customer updated the drivers to (1.74.22.v41.1) and the performance is now normal.

Drivers as of 1/13/2013 can be found here.

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESX41-BROADCOM-BNX2X-17422V411&productId=230#dt_version_history

In ESX 4.1 you can find the driver version by running these commands via the CLI.

Grab the nic device name

#esxcfg-nics -l

Name    PCI           Driver      Link Speed     Duplex MAC Address       MTU    Description                

vmnic0  0000:05:00.00 bnx2x       Up   10000Mbps Full   00:25:90:88:ed:ac 9000   Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM57810 10 Gigabit Ethernet

vmnic1  0000:05:00.01 bnx2x       Up   10000Mbps Full   00:25:90:88:ed:ae 9000   Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM57810 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Grab the driver version

#ethtool -i vmnic0

driver: bnx2x

version: 1.72.54.v41.1

firmware-version: bc 7.4.19

bus-info: 0000:05:00.0