We recently purchased 8 new HPE DL380 Gen10 servers. They came with two 10Gbe ports embedded on the motherboard and two 10Gbe ports on a PCI card. All of these use the Intel X710 controller. Before I purchased these servers I had no idea how many problems these particular nics have given people. Here is a sampling of issues:
Install ESXi 6.5 on R730 with Intel X710
https://lonesysadmin.net/2018/02/28/intel-x710-nics-are-crap/
http://www.v-strange.de/index.php/15-vmware/239-vsphere-6-5-with-intel-x710-network-adapter
I have two DAC cables hooked from this server to my Juniper switch. In the ESXi console I select both of these nics for my management network, give it an IP address, mask, gateway, and dns server. I reboot the host and during the boot process pings to the management interface start working. Once the host is up and running for about 30 seconds, the pings stop. If I remove one of the nics from the management network, pings start again. In other words, when two nics are connected for the management network, it will not work. I have upgraded the driver and firmware on the HPE Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 562SFP+ Adapter (it uses the Intel X710 controller) thinking it might help. We are now sitting at driver version 1.5.8 and firmware 10.2.5. The server is running HPE customized ESXi 6.5 Update 1
Do you think the problem I am experiencing (two nics for the management network will not work) is caused by this controller?
Are there other things I can check that might be causing this behavior?