After booting Acronis True Image, server NICs are malfunctioning
I booted Acronis on my HP DL380 Gen9 server to try an pull an image of the ESXi install. This server has four 1Gb NIC's and six 10Gb NICs. The four 1Gb NICs are all on the same HP 331i card. I configured one of these NICs so that I could use an FTP server as the destination. That all seemed to work fine, I was able to connect to the FTP server and save the image. The issue appeared after I rebooted back into the ESXi OS. Now 2 of the 4 NICs on the 331i board are no longer able to negotiate a connection with my switch. I have powered the server completely off and unplugged it for 10 minutes just to make sure everything was cleared out, but the issue persists. I have moved the NICs to different switch ports and they continue to malfunction. I can only guess that the NIC driver the Acronis image loaded has somehow messed with the firmware on the 331i board and made some kind of permanent change. Not sure how to recover from this. I hope re-writing the firmware will fix it. I have a case opened with HP.


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I really was not expecting any help. This was more of a warning that there may be unintended consequences in certain scenarios. This should have been a very passive event that I was not even sure would succeed, but did not think there would be any harm from the attempt. Yet, here I am with 2 out of 4 NICs malfunctioning just from running Acronis. Could just be a firmware issue with this particular NIC and an update will hopefully sort it out.
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Just to follow up, we had HP replace the motherboard and that did not resolve the issue. We rebooted the switch and the NICs were restored. No idea why moving to different ports did not fix the issue, but it is what it is. So there appears to be some issue with Brocade VDX 6740-T, HP 331i, and Acronis True Image drivers that causes the switch to act stupid.
My faith in Acronis is restored. I am glad it was not anything physical that was damaged.
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