Wired Intelligent Edge

Our hp e5406zl started dropping pings to our local network. It will work for a short period of time and then start dropping again. All our PoE Phones seem to be OK.  In troubleshooting I made sure the time was set correctly. I updated the firmware. There are no major collisions. I took my servers off of the hp e5406zl and put them in another switch then they ping just fine. I connect them to the hp e5406zl and they are fine for about 30 minutes and then they start to drop pings. The Internet is OK. I disabled PoE on ports that did not need power. V6 is already disabled.

Hello,

Are there actual connection issues, or are you just using ping and considering it an issue when they time out? Judging by your description it sounds like the network itself running fine. Keep in mind that the switch will respond to ICMP with lowest priority when it has other traffic to handle, so if your switch is quite busy forwarding traffic it does not necessarily indicate a problem just because some pings time out. What were you pinging anyway, and from where?

Regarding taking those servers off the switch temporarily - did you actually test pinging from a connected device on the 5406 to the switch itself afterwards? Were the results better after removing the servers? It sounds like you only tested from the servers to the other switch you moved them to.

Ping isn't intended as a tool to measure the performance of your network anyway. Have you considered trying something like iperf?

I agree with Justin... never ping to/from a switch and draw conclusions from these results only.
If the ping-issues you noticed are from a device on one switch-port to a device on another switch-port, and that doen't happen when these devices are connected to another switch... then yes: the switch probably has an issue.
So where from/to were you issueing this ping ?