Poweredge R720 issue with VMWare High Availability

Question

I'm not sure where to post this but I'll start with hardware.  We have a VMWare cluster with 3 hosts.  All three host are identical (purchased the same time and serial number are sequential).  2 of the hosts are working fine and have been for almost a year.  The 3rd one has been getting a vSphere HA status is 'Network Partitioned'.  The previous Systems Manager didn't do any real diagnostics.  I just started 3 weeks ago and need to get this 3rd server running.  During the past several days, I tested each nic port to see if it was a network card issue.  One every port, the HA would go would go up and down a couple of times during the testing.  For example, last night it went down twice.  Once for 30 minutes and the other for 45 minutes.  We need to get this issue resolved since we need to migrate a Citrix farm to this server.  VMWare documentation states that this can occur for these reasons - VLAN tagging (not implemented), failure of physical NIC or Switch (tested the 4 on board NIC and the 4 ports on the NIC adapter, even removed the adapter and tested onboard only and the switch has been replaced - note that the 2 other servers are on the same switch with no issues),  configuring a cluster with some hosts IPv4 only and others IPv6 only (we are using IPv4 only), or the management networks for some hosts were moved to a different virtual switch without first putting the host into maintenance mode (all configuration changes have been done in maintenance mode).  I am wondering if there could be another underlying hardware issue that could be causing this.  Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Hi, What NIC do you have installed? Updating the BIOS and NIC firmware would be a good place to start. What version of Vmware are you running?

rsarran1 · Answer

The onboard nic is the Broadcom GbE 4P 5719-t. The NIC card is Broadcom GbE 4P 5720-t.

System BIO is 2.2.2

Firmware 1.57.57 Build 04

VMWare ESXi 5.5.0 Build 2718055

All 3 of our PowerEdge R720 have the above settings.

Thanks.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Try updating the BIOS: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=MKCTM

And NIC firmware http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=PVRHM&fileId=3485475941&osCode=XI55&productCode=poweredge-r720&languageCode=EN&categoryId=NI

When the HA is not available does the system still have network access?

PowerEdge Hardware General

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