dead I/O on igb-nic (ESXi 6.7)

Hi,

I'm running a homelab with ESXi 6.7 (13006603). I got three nics in my host, two are onboard and one is an Intel ET 82576 dual-port pci-e card. All nics are assigned to the same vSwitch; actually only one is connected to the (physical) switch atm.

When I'm using one of the 82576 nics and put heavy load on it (like backing up VMs via Nakivo B&R) the nic stops workign after a while and is dead/Not responding anymore. Only a reboot of the host or (much easier) physically reconnecting the nic (cable out, cable in) solves the problem.

I was guessing there is a driver issue, so I updated to the latest driver by intel:

[root@esxi:~] /usr/sbin/esxcfg-nics -l

Name    PCI          Driver      Link Speed      Duplex MAC Address       MTU    Description

vmnic0  0000:04:00.0 ne1000      Down 0Mbps      Half   00:25:90:a7:65:dc 1500   Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

vmnic1  0000:00:19.0 ne1000      Up   1000Mbps   Full   00:25:90:a7:65:dd 1500   Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection

vmnic2  0000:01:00.0 igb         Down 0Mbps      Half   90:e2:ba:1e:4d:c6 1500   Intel Corporation 82576 Gigabit Network Connection

vmnic3  0000:01:00.1 igb         Down 0Mbps      Half   90:e2:ba:1e:4d:c7 1500   Intel Corporation 82576 Gigabit Network Connection

[root@esxi:~] esxcli software vib list|grep igb

net-igb                        5.2.5-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820            Intel   VMwareCertified   2019-06-16

igbn                           0.1.1.0-4vmw.670.2.48.13006603        VMW     VMwareCertified   2019-06-07

Unfortunately this didn't solve the problem.

However ... this behaviour doesn't occur, when I'm using one of the nics using the ne1000 driver.

Any idea how to solve the issue?

(... or at least dig down to it's root?)

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards

Chris

PS: I found another thread which might be connected to my problem: Stopping I/O on vmnic0  Same system behaviour, same driver.