Dell M600 Blades randomly disabling network cards

[portelan]

Hello, I am running a Dell M1000e chassis with M600 Blades. Each blade has the 2 built in network cards using 2 pass through modules.

I downloaded Vmware ESX-i 3.5 U4 (have been testing U2/U3 to) labeled for Dell from Vmware. Everything loads fine, but one of the network cards (Never both) will sometimes show up as being down/disconnected. Sometimes it will work, then I'll come in the next morning and it's disconnected.

Dell says they can not help with this problem, but yet it shows as supported hardware. After googling, searching, asking around, I can't find much information on this problem other than a rumor of a Network Card Driver (If so, wouldn't it have been updated in U4?).

Has anyone seen a resolution for this problem?

Thanks!

Brad

[AndreTheGiant]

If you have a similar problem, Dell must solve it

Verify that hardware power management is disable.

Verify also is there are some firmware update.

Andre

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[runclear]

I have 10 or so nodes on the M600 Blades and havent run into this issue yet - what version firmware are your blades on?

And when you say "one network card, you mean one of the onboard "nic ports" correct?" we also use the 2 additioonal ports on a mezzanine riser card (total of 4 ports)

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[portelan]

I'm in the process of updating the NIC firmware. The BIOS, etc are all up to date. Which version of Vmware are you running? ESX-i?

Brad