Broadcom 1.60 driver for ESX/ESXi 4.1 and mezzanine adapters.

[chuckk281]

Eyal, Richard and others asked about the latest Broadcom 1.60 driver for ESX/ESXi 4.1:

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I am joining Richard's question on this…

The ISO file has the following under the offline-bundle folder

I assume we need to install the 1.60.50.v41.2 file; What about the rest?

Also, has anyone managed to install those under VMware Update Manager? (It gave me an error when I tried to import them into VUM.

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Martin chimed in:

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Hello colleagues,

Now that the long-awaited Broadcom driver package for 4.1 is available I have documented the installation procedure, see below. I have tried Update Manager on these files without success. See the info below for instructions on how to install the drivers using vSphereCLI.

What I am still missing is some kind of information on the driver package. For example: which of the 4 different drivers applies to which component/server? Should I always install all 4 drivers?

http://aso.deu.hp.com/vmware/mix/esx41-g6+7-driver/

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Neil provided more info:

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My interpretation of the drivers is as follows  

• For blades with the 1Gbps Broadcom NICs (e.g. BL460 G1 and G5. Include if you have a G6 with 1Gbps Broadcom based Mezz cards)
  BCM-bnx2-2.0.15g.8.v41.1-offline_bundle-320302.zip (BCM-bnx2-2.0.15g.8.v41.1 : bnx2:  net driver for VMware ESX)
• For blades with Flex-NIC adaptors (e.g. BL460 G6) - BCM-bnx2x-1.60.50.v41.2-offline_bundle-320302.zip
  (BCM-bnx2x-1.60.50.v41.2  : bnx2x: net driver for VMware ESX)
• For blades with Flex-NIC adaptors (may only be needed if using hardware iSCSI – require Virtual Connect f/w 3.11??) (e.g. BL460 G6)
  BCM-bnx2i-1.9.1k.v41.1-offline_bundle-320302.zip   (BCM-bnx2i-1.9.1k.v41.1   : bnx2i: iSCSI driver for VMware ESX)
• For blades with Flex-Fabric adaptors (i.e. BL490 G7, or earlier with the Flex-Fabric Mezz adaptor)
  BCM-cnic-1.10.2m.v41.1-offline_bundle-320302.zip   (BCM-cnic-1.10.2m.v41.1   : cnic:  Converged NIC driver for VMware ESX

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We are looking for additional info from the product team to confirm the info above. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contribute.

[chuckk281]

The only file needed is the bnx2x file.

All others are not needed and relate to iSCSI and other uses.

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From Ron in our VMware engineering group here at HP.