Surprised I did not see this last year. Did you ever find a resolution? I saw this same type of behavior on many Proliant DL380s which happened to be running ESXi 4.1 U3 at the time. Seen across different clusters, different switches, and the problem was intermittent (did not happen with every auto-negotiation). Only had the problem w/ the integrated 1Gb Broadcom nics, the Intel nics In these servers never had problems. The model of nic and driver were different in my case (5709 based, bnx2 driver). Went through all the same troubleshooting steps: made sure auto/auto was configured, updated firmware/drivers, swapped cables. Unfortunately, the vendors could not reproduce, and concluded "it's not our problem". And when I would mention it could be a driver problem, I would get told "no no no that's not possible, this is at the hardware level". If that's the case, why do I see old KBs for similar issues where a driver update is the fix? Still a mystery, though not much of a concern at the present time.
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