Has anybody had issues with upgrading to the latest Broadcom NIC firmware v7.4.8.
I have a Dell M620 blade server which has the Broadcom BCM57810 LOMs. The current firmware is 7.2.20. Apparently the combination of this NIC (it's a 10Gbps CNA type), RHEL 6.2 64bit and Force10 MXL blade switches, has an issue where the NIC ports keep flapping (go up and down very rapidly). Although I have setup bonding across the two LOMs (and I am using NPAR) in an active-standby configuration (mode=1 in Linux) this flapping activity is causing certain processes to go crazy. Atleast I have seen the Oracle SIP application server and oracle 11gR2 RAC behave crazy and crash and reboot or just shutdown.
Long story short, the solution provided by Dell - upgrade to v7.4.8 of the NIC firmware. Ok, sounds reasonable. I am still searching for the firmware release notes.
The firmware upgrade is easy and I just down the .bin file and execute it like a shell script. At the end, it reboots. But after the reboot, the interfaces do not come back.
The workaround which I discovered and also seems to work is to power down the server and reseat it in the M1000e chassis. I think it must be causing the NIC adapters to re-initialize and the new firmware version to take effect; not sure just my guess.
Has anybody else seen this and know why this is happening. Dell hasn't got back to me. I have the latest CMC (4.31) and iDRAC (1.37.35) versions.