Connectivity issues when using Emulex elxnet Driver

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article addresses a known issue with the elxnet native driver jointly developed by VMware and Emulex for certain network adapters.

Symptoms:
In ESXi 5.5 environment having OCe10102 and OCe11102 adapters using Emulex elxnet driver version earlier than 10.5.65.4 and configured for port mirroring, VLAN Tagging, VMware NSX, or VXLAN bridging, you may experience these symptoms:

• Packets get dropped, resulting in intermittent connectivity issues and loss of ping packets.
• You experience packet loss for packets that get malformed or dropped by the NIC.
• An example of such traffic is ARP or OSPF packets.
• The issue resolves itself and the connectivity is randomly lost and restored on its own.
• Packet captures done on switch ports between the hosts may show malformed packets and packets with incorrect checksum.
• Packet captures done on switch ports between the hosts may show an unexpectedly long number in the length field of the IP header and random data added to the end of the packet.

Cause

Packets may become malformed, causing dropped connections. This problem manifests when a packet received on an Emulex NIC is forwarded out to the same or a different Emulex NIC. This issue has been seen in environments that use Emulex cards having VID/DID 19a2:0710, and 19A2:0700 (search the VMware IO Devices HCL for these vendor and device IDs).

Resolution

This issue is resolved in Emulex elxnet Driver version 10.5.65.4, available at VMware Downloads.

Additional Information

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OCe10102 アダプタや OCe11102 アダプタ、または OEM に相当するもので Emulex elxnet Driver バージョン 10.2.298.5 以前を使用している場合のパケット ドロップおよび接続の問題
在使用 Emulex elxnet 驱动程序时出现连接问题

Impact/Risks: