Network Connectivity to WS460C blades in C7000

[chuckn]

Hello,
We have two C7000 enclosures with 6 WS460C blades. Since upgrading the OA’s in both enclosures to 3.21 we are having intermittent network connectivity issues somewhere between the Cisco switch and the blade bays.
For example Windows detects that the "Network Cable is unplugged". The blade boot-up sequence also reports the "Network Cable is unplugged" when PXE booting.
If the blade is moved into another bay then the network will sometimes work, but this is intermittent. We have 2 types of blades, XW460C and WS/BL460C this problem only seams to affect the WS/BL460Cs in both enclosures. The most of the XW460Cs do seam to be OK though, only 1 seams to suffer from this problem.
I have spent several hours on the phone to HP, who are currently looking at the OA logs..
Has anybody seen this issue before or have any idea what could be causing it, everything was OK before the OA update to 3.21, but I haven’t seen/read of anybody else having this issue.
Firmware versions – C7000 OA 3.21
BL/WS460Cs - I24 12/01/2010 (Ilo 2.05 Dec 16 2010)
XW460Cs - V03 11/02/2008 (most of these work so we are not upgrading this FW). (ilo 1.79 Aug 28 2009)
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks.
Matt

[Stevem]

Matt,

I find it strange that this issue popped up after the OA upgrade to 3.21.  The OA is not in the data path and could be removed from the enclosure and not effect the servers ability to connect to the network.  This may be coincidence that this occurred about the same time the OA was upgraded.  I would look at the NIC drivers, to ensure no issues there.  But, I would also look at the CISCO switch, check to see if port flapping is occuring on those ports.  Also, verify the version of IOS that is installed, there was a CISCO bug that caused switch ports to flap.  This issue was fixed about a year or so ago, so you may need to upgrade your switches, if not current.

[Dnortham]

In your environment setup; do you have the OA's on the Same VLAN's as your Blade Networks?  Would be interested to know, cause we have had network issues on our Virtual Connects, and HP has blamed the OA's being on the same VLAN's as the Blade network's.

We too are getting ready to upgrade from OA ver 2.6 to ver 3.21 and due to past experiences are looking for other's reported issues first.