ESXi 4.1u1 lost network interface under load

[dmarck]

Dear colleagues,

I have some very strange problem:

Two Supermicro systems:

Supermicro 5016I-NTF (X8SIU mobo) or
Supermicro 5016I-MTF (X8SIE mobo)

Processors: X3430 or X2370
Several sets of memory: 16 (4x4G UDIMM) or 16 (2x8G RDIMM) or 32 (4x8G RDIMM)

On almost all possible combinations of the hardware above: ESXi 4.1.0 381591 installed abd booted ok, however, in a few seconds after loading it with real work such as VM start, network interface (Intel 82574L) goes down (stops sending packets, no MAC is shown on the physical switch) and never returns; restarting management network, bringing switch port down/up does not help.

Booted off FreeBSD 8 and load with loop of parallel building world from NFS to mfs does not releal a problem.

Disabling TSO on ESXi does not help either.

Any hints?

[nkrishnan]

Loosing Mac is tend to be hardware problem. did you experiance the problem in any other OS installed on the same Hardware.

[dmarck]

As I stated, I successfully load network, CPU and memory by repeadly parallel compilation of FreeBSD world from NFS to memory FS, for several hours and LoadAverage > 16 without any issues.

I then tend to think it's problem between ESXi e1000 driver and this particular NIC chip (pci info: card=0x040d15d9 chip=0x10d38086 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00)

[sergeda]

The same problem here with ESX 4.1 and this network card. Everything going fine until Veeam Backup tries to backup VMs and transfer it to backup location. Then host losing network and we should reboot it.