I posted this on the HP blade forum, but got no responses. Hopefully, I'll have better luck here..
We have a number of HP BL465c G7 blades running ESXi 5.0. They have the NC551i Emulex based flex-10 NIC. Per the HP recommendations earlier this year we updated the drivers to 4.1.334.0.
We're looking at upgrading these to ESXi5.1 with the HP ISO. However, according to the "recipe" file, and the HP customer advisory C03533196, the recommended BE2Net driver is 4.1.255.11-1. Since the upgrade won't "downgrade" files, to put it at the correct version the workaround is to do a manual VIB install on each blade after the upgrade to 5.1. The "resolution" section says that "a future release" of the ISO will fix this, but it's been over 2 months and they still haven't fixed it.
According to the advisory, the downgrade is required due to interactions with the fiber channel driver (lpfc) when using FCoE.
However, we're not using FCoE on this interface and have no plans to. We have a dedicated QLogic fiber channel card for the SAN communications. The Emulex BE2Net driver is only used for networking.
Since we're not using the Emulex for FCoE, do I still need to downgrade the BE2Net driver?
