Had an issue where I would install CentOS on these HP blades and I would be able to see 16 nics. But when I installed ESXi 4.1 I only saw 8 nics. 16 is the right number because each flexNIC has 4 vNics. So with 4 of these, I wanted to see some serious bandwidth. After fumbling around we finally came to the conclusion that the be2net driver was not loaded on the hypervisor.
My Mezzanine card is a HP NC550m Dual Port Flex-10 10GbE BL-c Adapter. My HP rep said that these were not going to be supported by HP on ESXi 4.1 until November and that I could drop back to 4.0 or he could try to get me some beta code.
I found that you can just download the driver
here. I tried a similar route by installing the hp-esxi4.1uX-bundle from HPs website but that just gave me stuff I didn't need (like iLo drivers).
The link above is an ISO image. The easiest way for me to install it on a running machine was to open the ISO on a linux machine and then copy the files to the ESX hosts:
# mkdir foo
# mount vmware-esx-drivers-net-be2net_400.2.102.440.0-1vm* foo -o loop
# cd foo/offline-bundle
# scp SVE-be2net-2.102.440.0-offline_bundle-292682.zip vhost001:/
Then you just need to install it. The only problem with this is that it involves a entering maintenance mode and then a reboot. Is this windows xp or something? We're just talking about a driver here...
Anyway, SSH to the ESXi 4.1 (or use VUG if you want to pay $500 bucks instead). Since I use xCAT, I have passwordless SSH set up:
# vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
# esxupdate update --bundle /SVE-be2net-2.102.440.0-offline_bundle-292682.zip
# vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
# reboot; exit
After the node reboots you can run:
esxcfg-nics -l
you'll be able to see all 16 nics.
Hope that saves you time as it took me a while to figure this out...
My next post will talk about how to integrate this into the kickstart file so you don't have to do any after-the-install junk.