If you have a need for a quad port NIC on the HP c-Class Blades on ESX, make sure it is the NC325m and not the NC364m. The NC325m is certified for VMWare ESX and the NC364m isn’t. The NC325m is Broadcom based (I believe) and the NC364m is Intel based.
Link to the Quick specs for the cards and the VI3 Compat Guide:
A big thanks to Don at my company for helping out with this one!
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Mmm, I have 4 of these arriving on Monday - might have to rethink that one then.
I did have it vetted by HP, but that’s not always 100%
Will post up my findings
Sounds great! In our case the cards were not seen by ESX when we installed them even though they were seen by the Onbard Administrator. I knew we did quad ports in another account so we then did the research with the VMWare Compat guide and then confirmed with our local HP technical rep.
Turns out we used the 325’s in on account and the 364’s in the other.
Thanks for coming by!
Aaron
Thanks for the tip!
Not a problem at all! Thanks for taking the time to comment!
And before using a quad-port nic, check if it’s not the one affected by the driver bug: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/01/27/intel-quad-port-nic-and-vst/
I just saw that the other day. I agree that could be pretty nasty until VMWare fixes the problem!
Thanks again!
for those that did not notice this yet, vmware fixed the issue with the quad-port nics..
I have 12 680C blades for an implementation I am doing right now, and this issue has caused me some headache. The NC325m is the Broadcom version, which works well. The thing about this card is that it has the same chipset as the IBM Intel OEM Pro 1000 Card….which is supported with the e1000 driver.