broadcom 57711 nics were showing up as link down from vcenter. this is on vsphere 4u2.
the bnx2 driver for these nics was 1.45, i updated the driver to 1.48 and no change.

ethtool -i wasn’t revealing any information on those particular nics…so it very much seemed a driver issue. upgraded the driver once more to 1.52 and that resolved the issue.

ethtool -i vmnic9
driver: bnx2x
version: 1.52.12.v40.3
firmware-version: 5.0.12 bc 5.0.13 phy 0aa0:0406
bus-info: 0000:07:00.1

driver update process:
esxupdate –bundle=BCM-bnx2x-1.52.12.v40.3-offline_bundle-223054.zip update