Hi,
I have a bunch (actually around 50 boards) of Intel X710-DA2 adapters, and similar number of servers running ESX 6.0. The problem is: as soon as the server starts exchanging the traffic using X710, it reboots. Why I'm writing here instead of the VMWare support: because when the adapter stays idle (we use onboard copper gigabit i350 adapters to mitigate the issue), the server is rock stable. When using the Mellanox ConnextX-3 EN boards (recently we aquired a couple for testing purposes) the server doesn't crash either. So I'm quite sure either it's the board or it's driver.
As about the Intel drivers for ESX: the problem is persistent across all available versions of the driver from 1.2.48 to 2.0.6 (we also tried the 1.4.28 in the middle). The NVM firmware version also doesn't seem to solve this - today we performed the tests on the 5.05 firmware, with 2.0.6 drivers - and the uptime was just a couple of minutes before server rebooted. I've also tried to disable TSO and LRO, but this didn't change the result.
I would appreciate greatly if someone will help me to mitigate this issue, because right now the only possible solution for us is switching to the Mellanox boards, which is quite expensive, as the server number is way big.
Thanks.