I’ve had confirmation from HP that the ESX 4.1 bnx2x 1.62.15.v41.2 driver is now officially supported with Flex-10. Although the supported driver is listed as 1.62.15.v41, the .2 at the end of the driver available for download was to facilitate a small change but has been fully tested and certified_._ http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx41_broadcom_netxtremeii_032311/ZHcqYnR0anBiZCpwcA==

My previous post was after confirmation from HP on 31st March saying this driver was not supported but a new version of the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 NICs Solution Recipe which is dated 23 March and says released on the 27th March wasn’t available when I checked with HP or looked on their site (although HP’s site isn’t the easiest to find anything on!).

I’ve had confirmation that this driver supports DCC/SmartLink and also contains the heap memory increase.

If you are upgrading from the 1.60.50.v41.2 driver you will not need to remove the previous heap workaround step.

Unfortunately, VMWare’s Compatibility Guides have not been updated to reflect the latest version, they still say the 1.60.50.v4.1.2 driver is the supported version for HP Virtual Connect, so hopefully HP and VMware will address this soon. http://www.vmware.com.tt/resources/compatibility/detail.php?device_cat=io&device_id=9404

This is a great step as the 1.62 driver versions for both ESX 4.1 and ESX 4.0 are now both available for deployment from Update Manager. I really hope this is the end of chasing blade Nic driver versions to work with Flex-10.

As usual, my Flex-10 ESX pre-requisites post has been updated.