ESXI 5.1 on 2011 Mac Mini: Network Dropouts.

[norrellmeister]

Hi,

I've been having quite a bit of trouble getting ESXI 5.1 running stable on a Mac Mini,  2011. The installation process was pretty painless, and the VMs in genreal have been running well, but I'm seeing an issue where, every couple of days, especially under heavy use, the network just disappears. I thought for a while I was seeing ESXI PSODs, but after connecting the Mac Mini back to the console, it looks like instead what I'm seeing is a complete network dropout on the ESXI host. Here's what I've figured out so far:

1. Looking at the console, when this happens the host still has a DHCP address, but if I re-start the managment network, the host can no longer DHCP.

2. All attemtps to SSH, ping or otherwise access the console or any VMs fail.

3. The logs I've found have nothing interesting except for disappearing access to the iSCSI volume, which makes sense if the network has dropped out.

4. I know the network socket is good, since I can plug in a laptop to the same cable, and it will work.

5. Restarting the Mac Mini seems to resolve the problem. Then, it re-occurs several days later.

I don't know if I'm dealing with some kind of hardware failure here, or a problem specific to the Mac Mini, or someting else. I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions on what to do about this.

[a_nut_in]

Can you do a esxcfg-nics -l and post the results

[norrellmeister]

Currently, this looks like:

~ #  esxcfg-nics -l

Name    PCI           Driver      Link Speed     Duplex MAC Address       MTU    Description                  

vmnic0  0000:02:00.00 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   40:6c:8f:20:45:15 1500   Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet

Of course, the server is currently working and whatever is causing this dropout hasn't occurred yet. When the dropout happens again, I'll try running this command again to see if the output changes.

[a_nut_in]

The command merely shows the nic installed.

Check this post - this might help.

http://paraguin.com/2012/01/18/the-mac-mini-vmware-esxi-5-server-part-3-follow-up/

Search for BCM57765

[norrellmeister]

Oh, interesting. Thanks for the link. I looked through the comments and someone mentioned that there's an upgraded tg3 driver with some fixes. I've just updated it. Hopefully that will help!

[a_nut_in]

No worries