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

 
waaronb
Respected Contributor

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

The 2013.09 SPP that came out the other day has updated NIC drivers for the NC382i on my DL360 G7 servers (and many other models... it's the "HP Broadcom 1Gb Multifunction Driver) for Win64.

 

It's version 7.8.6.0 and it does something very strange... we're running Server 2012 with Hyper-V, and after installing this NIC driver, our virtual machines running on this box (2 different servers in fact, have the same issue) are having problems.

 

The network connection between the virtuals and any other system are sporadic.  I haven't taken the time to track it specifically to see if it's just dropping packets or what.

 

For instance, we have a virtualized Ubuntu 13.04 server running Couchbase.  Attempts to connect to the default port 8091 that Couchbase uses are useless, it just times out.  But if I connect from another virtual machine on the same physical host, it's okay.  It's only when it goes on the actual network that it freaks out.

 

It may be all communications on the server, even to the host OS, but a lot of things like RDP sessions are pretty tolerant of network issues.

 

The solution for me was rolling back to the previous drivers, version 7.4.14.0.  That's all it took, and all of a sudden, all the software running on those virtual machines like Couchbase, MSSQL, IIS, etc. started working just fine.

 

I'm glad this was on our test environment... if I hadn't caught that before deploying to our production servers, it would have been a very bad day.  It was bad enough as it is, dealing with developers and QA who couldn't do their work for most of a morning.

26 REPLIES 26
broca002
New Member

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

I can confirm I have have seen the exact same strange buggy behaviour with Broadcom 7.8.6.0 driver on 2012 Hyper-V. As with you rolling back to the previous driver resolved the issue.

waaronb
Respected Contributor

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

Whew, I'm glad it's not just me then.  Hopefully HP will find this thread and fix it, and other people who may run into issues might stumble on this thread.

 

For me, since rolling back to the old driver fixed it, and nothing in the new version was important to me, I didn't think it was worth opening a ticket with HP.

 

Also, just to cover my bases, I rolled back the NIC driver for my other Hyper-V hosts that have different network cards besides that 382i... just in case.

 

 also rolled back the driver for my systems that aren't running Hyper-V.  I hadn't seen any issues with them in particular, but why take a chance?  I don't know for sure that the issue ONLY affects virtuals... maybe it's just easier to spot.  I had installed the new driver on 2 or 3 of my production IIS servers when I noticed the Hyper-V problem, so I didn't really check back to see if those servers had been having any communications issues, but I'll just wait until HP addresses the issue before installing it on ANY systems.

PZel
Trusted Contributor

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

Does anybody has  seen problems with this driver under W2K8 R2 ??

(or its it only buggy under 2012 ???)

PZ
waaronb
Respected Contributor

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

I had it installed on a couple of 2008 R2 servers that we use as IIS servers.  I didn't notice any trouble, but when we saw the issues with Server 2012 and Hyper-V, I decided to play it safe and roll back the driver version on those 2008 R2 servers also.

 

I didn't see anything in the release notes for the new driver version that I cared about, so I didn't want to take a chance that our live web traffic could have problems.

ThomasTrain
Visitor

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

Glad to see its not just me.  I perform an annual update of all my systems to the latest SPP, in this case to 2013.09 as the rest of you.

 

I'm running Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and also immediately noticed major problems after the update affecting network traffic on my guest VM systems (all running Windows 2008 R2).  My issues were massive packet loss, particularly to/from anything outside of the Hyper-V virtual switch but most noticably affecting HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

 

I ended up rolling back the NIC Firmware and drivers to resolve my issues (before I found this thread). 

 

I definately recommend avoiding the 7.8.6.0 broadcom drivers if you run Hyper-V though there are likely additional issues that I didn't see [yet] so I'm removing it from everything.

zeroagemain
Frequent Advisor

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

We have just had exactly the same issue (huge network issues after upgrade to SPP 2013-09-0B) but this was on a DL380 G6 with NC382i but simply running Windows Server 2008 x64, no R2, no 2012 and no Hyper-V.

We also had to roll back to 7.4.14.0 to fix it.
Stephan G
Regular Advisor

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

It broke our NPS on Windows 2k8 and our Lotus Domino replication on Windows 2k8. Both physical.

 

Stay away from this driver and HP .. second network problem with one of your updates in the last months .. so fix this as fast as possible or just remove it from the homepage.

robbied31
Occasional Visitor

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

I am having the same exact problems with a new Hyper-V Cluster on 2-DL360e gen8 servers running Server 2012 r2.  They have the 4-port 331 FLR network adapters and I am using drivers from the 9-30-13 SPP.  I am not using the multifunction driver, It won't allow me to install it. The problem is the only driver version available for the HP
Broadcom 1Gb Driver for Windows Server x64 Editions (American,
International)
 is the 16.0.0.17.  There is no previous version available for me to try.  I have only one option. 

 

does anyone know where I can find a previous version of drivers?

 

Thanks.

 

Rob

waaronb
Respected Contributor

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

I have a few DL380p Gen8 with the 331FLR adapters, and I'm using Hyper-V on Server 2012 with those okay.

 

However, I just realized that apparently I'm using the drivers that came with Windows Server, not the HP drivers.  Which is odd, since I used the SPP to install.  Well, it doesn't show up in my Version Control Agent... the driver version says it's 15.4.0.19 which looks like the previous one you're looking for.

 

On the link you have to that latest version, if you click on revision history you can find links to the older versions and download those.  Here's the link to the previous version (15.4.0.19b):

HP Broadcom 1Gb Driver for Windows Server 2008 x64 Editions 15.4.0.19 (B)