Hello,
I have a pair of S5500WB motherboards that I am using for ESXi lab servers. These both have been running for over 2 years without issue. I have a second dual-port 1GB NIC card in the PCIe slot of both so there are a total of four 1GB NICs.
As of Sunday, vmnic0 (first port on the motherboards) shows as "disconnected" on both servers. I recently updated the ESXi 5.5 software to the latest patch and not too long ago updated the BIOS with the latest EFI package from intel.com. Sunday I powered down my NAS and the ESXi servers to blow out the dust and clean them up. When I powered them on is when I noticed that vmnic0 was no longer functioning. It says it's there, just that it's been disconnected. I swapped switch ports with the working vmnic1 and no luck. I swapped cables with vmnic1, no luck. I rebooted. I cleared CMOS. I re-installed ESXi. I re-flashed the BIOS. No luck with any of that. If I try to PXE boot, the NIC0 fails with a "media disconnected" error, NIC1 just times out waiting for DHCP. I have replaced/checked every media component between the server NIC0 and the switch. There are no link/activity lights on NIC0 or its switch port. Not even during POST/boot up. The lights are working fine on NIC1.
NICs 1, 2, and 3 are up and running fine. If this were just one motherboard, I would suspect faulty hardware, but to happen to both servers at the same time, I am thinking there is something sketchy in the BIOS update that I performed. Maybe related to the BMC?
I am at a loss with the BMC components on this motherboard. I have no idea what function they serve and if they are at all useful to me/ESXi. It's just a lab, and NIC0/NIC1 are just management interfaces in a redundant configuration. NIC2 and NIC3 do all the VM and iSCSI traffic. Since I still have NIC1 I am not inconvenienced other than the ESXi alarm about lost redundancy.
Anyone have any ideas about what else I can check or change to recover NIC0 on these two boards? Would the hardware confidence test (HCT) be of any help? I loaded a linux distro on the server and still did not have access to NIC0, so I do not think the issue is with ESXi (it could have initiated it).
Does the BMC interface piggy-back NIC0? Could that be causing an issue?