HP Flex-10 firmware bug and PXE kills Virtual Connect.
HP has discovered a bug in their latest Flex-10 firmware version 3.15.
The bug occurs when you have blank blades going through continuous PXE boot cycles. Each time a blade PXE boots Virtual Connect sees the status of the port change and it triggers a process in Virtual Connect that queries the status of all its NICs, which runs but it does not release the memory used.
When Virtual Connect runs out of memory it restarts some of its internal network processes, which causes a network outage. Reseating the Flex-10 switches clears the memory leak and depending on how many blades are power cycling, it can take a couple of days for the memory to run out again. If you are seeing seemingly random network disconnections, this could be the cause.
Future versions of Virtual Connect will apparently have memory usage graphs which may help.
Make sure you power off any blades you are not using rather than letting them power cycle to avoid the issue.
Apparently a 3.17 driver version is imminent from HP which will fix this issue as well as the DNS issue.
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