We’re using HP BL495c G6 blades with ESXi 4.0 U1, and the onboard NICS are disconnecting randomly upon reboot. Sometimes it happens after a single reboot, other times it takes 4 to cause the issue. The server uses the HP NC532i embedded NIC which is a rebadged Broadcom 57711E. In ESXi, the NIC uses the bnx2x driver. Things tried that haven’t worked to date: Broadcom v1.48 and v1.52 drivers on the VMware website Upgrading to Update 2 Turning off auto negotiation and hard coding the speed and duplex of the switchports and NICS Replaced the system board. It’s not a […]

At some stage while in contact with VMware support, they may give you drivers to try. These drivers will be in VIB (vSphere Installation Bundle) format and will look something like vmware-esx-drivers-net-bnx2x-400.1.52.12.v40.4-1.0.4.00000.x86_64.vib. I don’t know why this is not documented anywhere in the official docs, but here’s how to install these driver bundles into ESXi. scp the file to the ESXi server Run “esxupdate -b <filename>.vib –nosigcheck –nodeps update”. Run “esxupdate query –vib-view” to confirm that the driver bundle is installed. You may need to reboot for the driver to take effect. If you are fiddling with different driver revisions,

When you forcefully remove a Datastore while ESXi servers are still connected to it, all sorts of weird and wonderful things can happen. We recently had a team member accidentally install ESXi onto a LUN, blowing away the Datastore that was on it. ESXi servers become unstable, the VM’s that were running from the Datastore go into a zombie state where they may respond to pings but are not fully there because they are still running from memory but the disks have been removed from under them. The vCenter server will exhibit high DB load as the ESXi servers try to