HP BL465c G7 Slow network performance W2K3 SP2 (X86) NC551i

[davenc]

Team,

My customer has attempted a hardware refresh of installing Windows 2003 (X86) SP2 2 node Cluster onto HP BL465c G7 (Yes, I know this is a bad idea by customer has app compat issue).  The description of the problem is horrible network performance where copying files etc.  My first thought was this may be due to memory pressure of addressing 32 GB of RAM and many processors.  However, using poolmon I verified that less than 100 MB of paged\nonpaged pool was in use during problem so that's not it.  In the interest of troubleshooting I plan on reducing cores by half and half the the memory using /burnmemory in boot.ini.

I have verified that SNP is disabled as these are zeros

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
EnableTCPChimney= 0
EnableRSS= 0
EnableTCPA= 0

Currently installed driver:

BE2ND5X.SYS    |Emulex        |4.0.360.8     |Oct 17 2011 |Emulex Win2003 10Gb NDIS 5.2 miniport

I think HP website provides update which I will recommend:

HP Emulex 10GbE Driver for Windows Server 2003
4.1.355.3 (2 May 2012)

My question for forum experts is:

Are there any recommendations or guidlines on how to optimize NICs which use new technology like Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and downleve OS.  I am convinced this is the issue because that is really the main difference is hardware of this type seeing issue.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Dave