ESX nics disconnected

[Julian Garcia]

Hi all, I am using FLEX/10 on a C7000 chasis and Virtual Connect 2.30. I can not make ESX to work, all the NICS show as disconnected on the network manager. It works for any Windows Blade but not for ESX3.5 update 4 or ESXi 4.0. The Blades are BL460c G6 Thanks

[Jeffrey]

Julian I had a similar problem, if I recall what caused it was flashing the blade 10GbE NIC to the *latest* firmware, if memory serves me right, I downgraded one version earlier and the link went up on the ESX. On Windows, the NIC link seems to be up - but it wasn't stable; on my windows blade running virtualcenter, all my ESX hosts appeared "disconnected" after a while

[Julian Garcia]

Thanks Jeffrey, I will check out the firmware and post the results.

[Adrian Clint]

Just had a customer with exactly the same issue. Looking thru the VC 2.30 release notes I found that the NIC firmware must be at specific levels. Eg the NIC Boot rom must be 5.0.11. Now looking at the NIC firmware downloads for differing operating systems I found that not all the latest NIC firmware downloads are the same. It looks like you need firmware update version 2.2.3, earlier than that eg 2.1.5.1 and they do not have the 5.0.11. Even though the firmware updates for both versions came out on the same day 19th August. See the release notes for each firmware update - scroll to the bottom and check that the NC532i firmware in the left column is 5.0.11 - if its 4.8.0 dont use. So far Redhat Linux 5 64bit has the latest firmware and I think you can run that in ESX4

[David Claussen]

We had a very similar problem. In ESX4, one of the NICs was connecting to our SAN segment. Every time it connected, the VCM would go out. The bottom line was that the MTU size on the vSwitch that the SAN segment NIC attached to was default 1500. It needed to be increased to 9000 (Jumbo Frames). After that, the problem went away. I hope that helps you. PS - The same thing for a stand alone Windows server. - Dave

[Rico Lenherr_1]

Hello, i had the same problem with ESX 4. Use the driver update for the broadcom nic. http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/drivercd/esx40-net-bnx2x_400.1.48.107-1.0.4.html rico

[jdeavers919]

I've been using the v2.30 for VC on Flex-10 and I have no issues with ESX 4 for the NICs. Per best practices I ran the Firmware Maintenance CD and updated all the drivers and firmware and the broadcom was one of the updates. otherwise I have been running with no problems. Also I'm using VLANs for taging the NICs on ESX 4 hosts to VC.