ESX/ESXi hosts with NetXen HP NC375/NC522/NC523 and CN1000Q series lose network connectivity

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When using ESX/ESXi 3.5, 4.0, 4.1 and ESXi 5.x hosts with NetXen HP NC375T/NC375i, hosts lose network connectivity
• Random network outages and firmware dumps occur on a HP Proliant DL server series having NC 375 series NICs
• Host disconnects or appears as Not Responding in vCenter Server and cannot communicate with the management interface
• Host loses connectivity to the iSCSI or NFS storage
• Virtual machines become unresponsive and/or lose network connectivity
• In the systems VMkernel \messages logs, you see the error:
  
  nx_nic: Firmware hang detected. Severity code=0 Peg number=0 Error code=0 Return address=0
  
  
• In the VMkernel log on ESXi 5.x, you see entries similar to:
  
  WARNING: IT: 289: Removing vector 169 while it's being control by 0x4100056119c0
  WARNING: IT: 879: invalid vector 169
  WARNING: IT: 879: invalid vector 177
  WARNING: IT: 879: invalid vector 42
  WARNING: IT: 879: invalid vector 50

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Resolution

This is not a VMware issue.

 

This issue occurs with NetXen HP NC375/NC522/NC523 and CN1000Q series 1GB and 10GB network cards.

 

If you experience this issue, contact HP. For more information, see the HP Advisory.