Hi,
We have a following setup at our customer:
HP DL380 G5 with 8GB RAM, 68GB local HD
MSA2000 FC with 24x750GB HDs
ESX 3i 3.5
Ubuntu 8.04 Jeos acting as a file server
NetXen 10GbE network adapter
We had a problem that the NetXen network card just disappeared from ESX every 3 weeks. We contacted HP support and they tried to replace the card 3 or 4 times before they understood that the problem must be somewhere else. After that they told us that the firmware is wrong on the card and the ESX 3.5 Update 4 would upgrade the firmware. Well, I did as they told and everything with the update went without errors (I was using Update Manager from VI Client).
After that I started the Ubuntu VM and noticed that I cannot connect to it using ssh. Ping works well, but no other network traffic goes through. Also I can ping from Virtual machine console and ping works but anything else doesn't. It seems like some mystical zero-tolerance firewall has appeared between the VM and the production network.
Has anyone has similar problems? Is there a way to downgrade to update3 somehow? My customer would need the files from the server asap and I'm starting to feel quite helpless here. 
Any help would be appreciated.
Update: I managed to fix the problem by rolling back to Update 3 by pressing R key during the reboot of the server. Worked well, but now the network card firmware is also back to old one (it seems). So I spent 6 hours just to get back to the original problem. I'll wait till Monday when I'll get some answers from HP support The main thing is that I got the system up & running normally again.
Best regards,
Andy
Antti Pennanen
Ocaco Finland Ltd.
email. andy@ocaco.com
FIxed
Once you start to get responses to your post you can mark 2 posts as helpful and 1 as correct.
I also agree with Dave... Having current firmware may help in resolving your issue.
Thanks to everybody for fast replies
It's great to have support from the community so fast!
Yes, I was wondering how the vmware can update the network card firmware as well. I thought it would be a new driver. But I got this answer from HP support:
-
Information
The HP website is not containing any firmware for the NetXen based HP 10 GB network cards (NIC) like the NC510 and the NC512.
Reports have been submitted to HP support where people where trying to use the Redhat or SLES firmware package from the HP website in combination with the NetXen boot ISO /CD. The HP NetXen based 10 GB network card firmware was placed on a USB key or was added to the NetXen ISO / CD and was used for trying to flash and upgrade the HP 10 GB NIC firmware
NetXen based 10 GB network cards are using host-based firmware. This means that the Vmware driver consits of a driver part and a firmware image part. The moment the Vmware driver is loaded the host based firmware on teh NetXen card is automaticcally running the firmware level as supplied in the Vmware driver.
Due to the above it is not required to update the HP 10 GB based NetXen cards with a firmware package meant for Redhat or SLES
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So, NetXen cards have some kind of host-based firmware?
This is really weird problem. I'm now kind of thinking that maybe I have 2 separate problems here:
a) Update 4 breaks the connectivity between vSwitch and NetXen card
b) The old custom settings in virtual machine's vmx file (ethernet device type = vmxnet and ethernet.features="15" to enable jumbo frame support) are somehow not working under update4 anymore. I also had updated the vSwitch to use MTU 9000 for vSwitch linked to gigabit adapters and MTU 8000 for vSwitch linked to NetXen card.
Now the question is that either I have to reboot the server every 3 weeks to get rid of the original problem or try to solve the problems with update4 (which seems quite hard to debug).
I also noticed that the separate VM's connected to the same vSwitch can communicate with each other without any problems, so the problem has to be somewhere between vSwitch and the nework. The strangest thing is that the ping still goes through... 😮
Andy
Hi,
Indeed it was the problem with the netxen card firmware. HP sent us the instructions how to use NetXen LiveCD (based on SLAX linux) to upgrade the netxen card with HP supported firmware. Well, this of course didn't work We were checking out what the software was trying to do and noticed that some kernel module was missing from the cd (at least we couldn't find it).
I'm now waiting for some answers from HP again.
Best regards,
Andy