We're having an issue with our new Dell R740 hosts running ESXi 7.0 (tried u1 and u2) that the ping on the management interface will drop periodically. This will cause random alerts with our monitoring software thinking the host dropped out.
We're running BCM57416 over CAT6A. We also have R740s from a previous order that have Intel 10G nics and they don't have this issue. We've tried newer drivers and firmware for the BCM57416 cards but it doesn't resolve the issue.
The strange part is it only affects the host management IP, I can ping one of the VMs running on the host with no issues. In one case it sent about 870,000 continuous pings to one of our VMs running on that host and it didn't drop a single one, but the management IP still drops.
Also if I SSH into the host the SSH session will sometime stall and recover repeatedly.
On one host I pulled the QLogic 10G cards from one of our old hosts and installed it in there (running the qfle3 driver that was famously prone to PSODs in 6.7 until a new driver came out) and the problem seemed to go away. So it's just specific to the BCM7416 cards apparently and I'd rather not run 4 year old cards in my new servers as a workaround.
Anyone else dealing with this issue and/or have a fix for it?
