Updating broadcom NIC drivers on a Dell Poweredge R430

I've got a couple of Dell Poweredge R430 hypervisors that have Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet NIC's. I've never updated the drivers on these NIC's away from those which the OS installed... They are using a Broadcom Driver 15.6.1.3.

I was reading up on some Dell issues as we're seeing intermittent poor performance on the VM's running on these hypervisors (VMQ is disabled, before anyone says it), and I read something about making sure you swap out the OS installed drivers if the Machine is a Dell and it is using Broadcom NICs.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Under what circumstances should the OS provided driver be replaced?

What symptoms would one be likely to encounter if the drivers weren't replaced?

I can't do this yet, as the machines in question host production VM's and I cannot take them down until the weekend, but I'm wondering If this is something that I should consider as being a possible root cause or whether its something and nothing.

Solution 1:

Not a straight answer but some advice:

In general, I don't use NIC (or storage) drivers that come with the OS. I may be using them very early in initial setup but they are updated by the server vendor's drivers pretty much first thing. This ensures best compatibility and functionality. Additionally, I don't update drivers through Windows Update on servers.

Sometimes, when the server vendor's driver are possibly outdated or having issues I might try finding newer drivers directly from the hardware manufacturer (especially for Broadcom NICs).