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paulmack
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Intel Gigabit VT Quad Port Server Adapter and ESX 3.0.2 Update 1

Hi,

We've just got 2 Dell 2950's with one of these in each and two onboard broadcoms. I installed 3.0.2 Update 1 and the Intel VT quad card wasn't detected. Show'd up in lspci as unknown device. After a quick search I found the driver update to install the igb driver for this card. See this link

Cool I thought. Installed the update the nics appeared and I carried on configuring. When I started testing the hosts by vmotioning a test vm onto them the network connectivity from the VM dropped. It says it's connected but I get no ping responses. If I vmotion the vm back to one of my other esx hosts the ping responses come back.

I've tried everything I can think of including removing one of the uplink pNics from the vSwitch so it's only going through one of our cisco switches rather than the two for redundancy, setting the speed and duplex settings to everything possible on both the switch and the esx host. I've even swapped the card out for a older dual intel card I had lying around to verify it's a problem with this particular quad card! Worked perfectly withe the older dual card.

the SC has been configured with two pNic's. One from the onboard broadcom and one from the quad intel card. Works perfectly running on the intel card alone! Just can't any VM traffic to work on the quad intel card!

Anyone else got any ideas or can suggest something to try?

Cheers

Paul

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37 Replies
reubensi
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Is anyone aware if this issue stems to 3.5 as well?

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smoke455
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I upgraded my PE2950 to 3.5 last week and the card still does not work in an etherchannel.

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RyanWI
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I'm doing the same thing in VMware 3.5. No luck trunking whatsoever... anyone have an update? This is totally blown us out of the water. Just bought a whole new enviroment based off of these cards.

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Schorschi
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Open SR with VMware, ask them to address it, add to HCL, whatever is needed. They did this for us with the PT variant when 3.0.x GA driver has issues.

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starz
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I've setup a cluster on Dell PowerEdge 2950 using these NICs in a 3.5 environment, and no, they do not work properly when trunking VLANs onto them.

Without VLAN, no problem, with VLAN, lots of dropped packets. Which is weird, as I thought I would see no packets at all rather than >50% lost.

Our solution was to put the SC and VMotion onto 2 ports on this NIC and use the 2 built in NICs for VLAN trunking. Not a great solution, it's rather a quick fix. I've called Dell Goldsupport and opened a case there, and they have forwarded this to their engineering and development team. I hope they can resolve this with VMware quickly.

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RyanWI
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The cards are flawed. VM has a PR about them. They will be fixed with ESX 3.5 Update 1. They can be used in access mode only, but you can only have 8 total ports of the igb driver. Supposedly its an issue with checksum offloading in tagged mode.

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jadamt
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Thanks for the heads up starz, we'll have to open up a similar ticket as we're also working on setting up a similar new cluster.

Glad to hear it works okay for now without trunking VLANs.

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depping
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VMware just created this KB article about the problem:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/dynamickc.do?externalId=1003660&sliceId=1&command=show&forward=nont...

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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eBuddha
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What is going on with this? There has been absolutely zero movement for this critical issue. We have over $500,000 in hardware that is basically sitting here because we cannot put production data on it due to this bug. VMware listed this card in the hardware compatibility guide which is why we purchased our hosts with these cards. I cannot begin to express my disappointment and frustration at how poorly this is being handled.

The "workaround" provided is no workaround at all since it greatly hampers the flexibility that we have by not tying each VLAN to physical ports. For us it isn't even an option due to the vast number of VLAN's we use in our environment. Our aggregate bandwidth and failover capabilities would be reduced so severely that it is a joke to suggest that we not use port trunking on our switches. What is VMware doing about this issue?

Additionally would whoever moderates this forum kindly remove the "answered" flag from this post. Even though saying ,"We know we have a problem" is an answer it certainly is not the correct answer or one that is even suitable for other enterprises in our situation.

E-

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SWCS833
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Yes this is a major issue. I am not yet running ESX but will be rolling it out in the next few months. We are purchasing 4-5 servers that will each have 2 of these cards.

I cannot believe that VMWare has not pushed this issue to critical and released a patch already.

I have made my sales engineer aware of this problem and he is contacting Intel to ensure they know about this. I hope this will get resolved ASAP. There is no way we could deploy ESX with the number of VLANs we have.

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inewby
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I agree, VMware have not handled this very well, it's a shocker!

I resolved the problem by forcing Dell to swap the VT cards for Intel PT Quad port NICs and then complaining to our VMware Rep.

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reubensi
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I did the same thing, I returned the cards to dell and got PT cards instead. I am also quite surprised at how long this issue has lasted. I was lucky that my rep at dell was good to us and let us return the cards.

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SWCS833
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I just looked at Intel's website, they do not even list VT Cards as one of their Server Adapters. Is the VT just the driver?

When looking at the Dell site, they only offere the VT Card in their 2950s.

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RyanWI
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My sympathy to anyone because we were in the same position. Thankfully Dell has fantastic customer service and swapped all 18 of our NICs. VMware is still on the original driver release, it's really sad.

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eBuddha
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Does anyone know the status of this? Every time we call VMware they state that the patch is being tested. In fact, when we called over a month ago they said that everything was working fine in their testing with the patch, and they expected the update to be available during the next patch release. We missed that window, but I am hoping someone here can shed some light on this issue.

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admin
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Patches are out for both ESX 3.0.2 and ESX 3.5:

ESX 3.0.2 Patch -

ESX 3.5 Patch -

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RyanWI
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Have you tested this?

Are Intel ZOAR NICs == Intel Gigabit VT?

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admin
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I have not personally tested it only because I do not have access to one of these NICs at my location. But Intel Zoar = Intel VT.

Regards,

-Kris

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