We recently started upgrading the hosts in our production vSphere cluster. We replaced some hosts with new ones and we upgraded some existing hosts with more RAM. All servers in our cluster will eventually have at least two (2) Intel 10Gb network adapters which will be multi-purpose for VM traffic as well as VMotion traffic. Since we rely on
The addition of the new hosts went fine and the new 10Gb uplinks were speedy. When we started adding new 10Gb NICs to the older hosts everything seemed fine but I checked the NIC stats via esxcli on the hosts and the Receive missed errors counter started to increment. I searched all over Google and VMware's sites and forums and didn't find anything on this counter or its meaning.
For reference the new hosts hardware have onboard Intel 82599EB 10Gb SFI/SFP+ NICs and the add-in cards for the older hosts are Intel 10G 2P X520.
The only thing that changed was adding memory to the hosts and the new NICs. I checked on VMware's site for ESXi 5.1 and there was a newer driver VIB for the Intel 10Gb NICs (they use the ixgbe vmkernel module). I decided to give that a try.
The version of ixgbe that is current in ESXi 5.1U1 with all patches updated via vSphere Update Manager as shown on our other hosts is net-ixgbe 3.7.13.6iov-10vmw.510.1.20.1312873. You can see what VIBs are installed on your host by enabling SSH access to the host or the ESXi shell, logging in and running:
esxcli software vib list
I grabbed the VMware ESXi 5.0/5.1 Driver CD for Intel X540 and 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controllers at: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXI5X-INTEL-IXGBE-3187&productId=285#sthash.aoGzIQdz.dpuf
I placed the host in maintenance mode, unzipped offline bundle on one of our web servers, and manually updated one of the hosts with the following command line:
esxcli software vib update -v http://vibhostingserver/path/to/expandedoffline/
NOTE: This update requires a reboot so make sure you migrate all your guests to another host and place this host in maintenance mode
Once I rebooted the host came up and after migrating machines to/from the host several times we saw no errors. After the update your hosts should show the following version:
net-ixgbe 3.7.13.6iov-10vmw.510.1.20.1312873
I've also added this driver package to our VUM repository so any new hosts get this new driver. Check out this fine post for information on patching hosts via esxcli and adding patches to vSphere Update Manager http://blog.mwpreston.net/2012/01/16/installing-offline-bundles-in-esxi-5/
I going to try to contact VMware and get better idea of what the Received missed error counter actually tells us and update this post at a later date.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Flux.