ESXi host BFD tunnels are down in an NSX environment

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• NSX-T Data Center
• ESXi Host BFD tunnels are down or intermittently down
• Impacted hosts are not receiving BFD packets from the tunnel peer
• Run the following command from an ESXi root shell, in the output for the tunnel experiencing the issue, the "recv" counter will not be incrementing

nsxdp-cli bfd sessions list

• Host NICs are Broadcom BCM5750x running bnxtnet driver:
  • VID 0x14e4 DID 0x1750 NetXtreme-E P2100D BCM57508 2x100G QSFP PCIE Ethernet
  • VID 0x14e4 DID 0x1751 NetXtreme E-Series Quad-port 25Gb OCP 3.0 Ethernet Adapter
• NIC firmware versions 220.xx, 221.xx, 222.xx and 223.xx.

Environment

VMware NSX-T Data Center
VMware NSX 4.0.0.1

Cause

This is a known issue with Broadcom BCM5750x NIC handling of BFD packets.

Resolution

This issue has been resolved in the following drivers :

ESXi 8.*  - 223.0.206.0 & later
ESXI 7.*  - 223.0.152.2 & later

Workaround:
There is no workaround.