Hi,
There is no problem in disabling the advanced mode in the Emulex BIOS. We worked extensively with HP to try and find the root of this problem.
Eventually after months they published the following customer advisory with the workaround: http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04608235
They claim that the lastest version of the driver resolves this issue: 10.2.477.20 (this is not available with the latest SPP and you will need to download it separately: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib2/software1/sc-linux-fw-sys/p930408510/v105241 or https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXI51-EMULEX-BE2NET-10247720&productId=285
For some background on the cause of this issue (why some cards have advanced mode enabled by default and others don not: (feedback from HP) The Emulex firmware that relates to Advance Mode / SR-IOV being enabled or disabled: With 4.2.x.x FW and previous, customers had the ability to manually set the state of SR-IOV in the NIC BIOS. In 4.6.x.x firmware, this ability was removed and the customer could no longer toggle the state of SR-IOV manually. This created major issues due to known compatibility issues with SR-IOV and certain OS’s. The ability to disable SR-IOV needed to be given back to the end user in the NIC BIOS to resolve that. This was accomplished by tying the SR-IOV state to the Advanced Mode Support State with FW 4.9.x.x and higher. So depending on the firmware version that was initially installed on the nic will affect whether Advanced Mode and SR-IOV are enabled or not.
Regards
Ciarán