ESXi 6.0 on Apple Xserve crashes

After having lots of problems with my Xserves crashing al lot after having upgraded them to ESXi 6.0, I decided I had to solve this.

Basically ESXi 6.0 with vSphere runs on Xserves.

After some time, i found out that it was not the server crashing.
It was the network connection that went down.

I knew this because a) the server was not dead, no PSOD or anything, and on my secondary network interface, the server was still pingable.

So, what did we do:

The Xserve 3.1 comes with these NICs installed:

Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

So what we did is exchange the PCI NIC to a

Intel Corporation I350 Gigabit Network Connection

Soon after that, VMware released ESXi 6.0U1.

And what do I read in the Release Notes:

VMware vSphere 6.0 Updated 1 Release Notes

An ESXi host might lose connectivity and e1000e virtual NIC might get reset 

An ESXi host might intermittently lose connectivity and e1000e virtual NIC might get reset. An All Paths Down (APD) condition to NFS volumes might also be observed. An error message similar to the following is written to the vmkernel.log file

packets completion seems stuck, issuing reset

This issue is resolved in this release.

You can check if this might be the case if you enter this in the command line of your server:

1. esxcli network nic list  

If a driver is listed as «e1000e» then you could try updating to 6.0U1