We've been running ESX on Dell 6850's, a 2650, and a 2950 for about 4 years now (well, the 2950's for a few months.) I migrated from 2.5.3 to 3.0.2 about 6 months ago with very little hassle.
During a large server refresh we decided to go with new Dell M600 blades (7) in M1000e chassis (2.) We're generally not bleeding edge people, but the cost/performance was great and we could use 4 nics + fiber channel for our ESX installs. So, we are using the 2 onboard Broadcom nics + the add on card for 2 more Boadcom nics (plus a Qlogic Fiber card.) All ethernet connects through pass-through modules, not internal switches. Windows works fine on these blades. They are dual proc, quad core, 32GB of ram booting from local SAS disks.
On to the problem. During setup the ESX installer finds the nics, they show up in the drop down box when assigning the service console. At the beginning of the boot process all 4 network lights are lit, some time before the console is available all network lights go out; if it's set for DHCP I get red errors on the console screen about no network (I wasn't smart enough to copy the errors down) and it shows a service console IP of 0.0.0.0. When logging in to the text console and running ifconfig it shows all interfaces in the "UP" state.
I have done installs with the Dell Systems Build disk 5.3.1 (preserving the Utility partition during ESX install) and without. When using the Dell Systems Build disk I also tried with and without setting ESX boot to partition (as the Dell Systems Build disk mentions just before rebooting to ESX install.) All the documentation I've read says the M600's are supported, as well as the Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708S cards (I used to use Intel Pro 1000 MT cards on the 6850's and 2650.) I've tried both Cisco switches and a little Netgear switch. I've installed both 3.5 (current 64607 build) and 3.0.2 (build 52542.) I've also tried removing the TCP Offload Engine key.
Has anyone else worked with these yet, did we buy these too early? (I'll be calling Dell in a minute; I just hate talking on the phone)