VMWare ESXi 4.1 NICs stops responding when copying database in SQL Server 2008 r2

Had a strange issue on some VMWare ESXi 4.1 (build 260247) hosts running on a HP C7000 Blade encenter here today.

Blades:
3 BL460c G1 (Broadcom NC373i and NC382m NICs)
3 BL460c G6 (with Broadcom NetXtreme II 57711E/NC532i and NC326m NICs)
Running in EVC mode: "Inten Xeon 45nm Core2"

Interconnect bays:
2 gbe2c
2 gbe2c layer2/layer3

The problem happened on a clean install of Windows Server 2008 r2 with SQL Server 2008 r2. When I tried to copy a database in SQL Server Management Studio using the Wizard I got to the part where I choose "destination" and selected the network tab. This is when it's supposed to start broadcasting the network to find other SQL Servers. In my case I just get thrown out of RDP and VMWare remote console. The issue could be reproduced every time.

At first I thought the VM crashed, but it was still running (latest VM Tools jftr). What happened was that the interfaces on the esxi host that were connected to the two gbe2c (not the gbe2c layer2/layer3 which is a newer model) interconnect bay switches died. I could not ping the ESXi host, and cannot could not rescue the VMs since I was not able to connect to the Management network interface. The only way to get back in touch with the ESXi host was to cold boot the blade (from HP Onboard Administrator).

This only happened if the VM was running on a ESXi host on a BL460c G6 blade, it did NOT happen on the BL460c G1 blades. Therefore I updated firmware on the BL460c G6 blade and the gbe2c switches, but the problem persisted.

/var/log/messages showed a lot of Broadcom-related kernel panic messages, so I looked around for new drivers for the NetXtreme II NICs which I found here:

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/esx41_broadcom_netextremeii_dt/ZHcqYnRlaHRiZCVodw

Installing the 1.60.50 drivers on my BL460c G6 blades did the trick!

Non-supported network adapter on ESXi 4.1 vm

Got a VMWare vSphere cluster with 6 VMWare ESXi 4.1.0 hosts in it, and today when I was going to migrate a windows 2008 r2 server vm to another host within the same cluster I got the warning:

"Virtual ethernet card 'Network adapter 1' is not supported. This is not a limitation of the host in general, but of the virtual machine's configured guest OS on the selected host"

Turns out this vm still had a flexible type NIC installed, which worked fine but still gave me this warning when I migrated the vm. Removing the NIC and installing a VMXNET 3 adapter got rid of the warning!

Thanks to Ed at Linkfish consulting for the tip.