I ran across this one a few weeks ago and I wanted to share it. If you are using the BNT (Nortel) switch modules in the IBM BladeCenters and booting iSCSI to various OS’s, you might run into problems using the default values on the Nortel switch. We were seeing our LUN’s intermittently not attach at boot and/or crash loading up. This happened with Windows, Linux, and VMWare. After some searching I came up with this link to turn OFF autonegotiation. This setting used to be off but in the latest BNT firmwares, the default value was changed to ON. If you switch it back to off, you are able to boot everything fine.
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I just came with a similar bug with Broadcom 5706 on IBM Blades under VMware but it happens also on linux/windows with old drivers and it’s about auto-neg too. (For my problem, it got solved by latest broadcom drivers available).
For ESX 3.0.2 the patch has just been released, but we shall still wait for a ESX 3.5/ESXi version :’(
Here is the VMware KB (All Broadcom 5706 boards seems to be impacted).
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004720
For interested people I made a screencast about the issue here (WARNING: Resolution is 1920×1200 so it might eat up some memory) : http://lycos.dropcode.net/VMware/ESXBroadcomNetwork/ESXBroadcomNetwork.html