Well, did a reboot this evening to facilitate adding a hard drive to the system and within 15 minutes the network connections died. The server wasn't even busy. I was streaming a movie and that was all. In the syslog I have these entries:
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
crond[4529]: crond: USER root pid 20439 cmd /sbin/hostd-probe
syslog[20440] starting hostd probing.
syslog[20440]: hostd probing is done.
sfcb-vmware_base[5821]: TIMEOUT DOING SHARED SOCKET RECV RESULT (5821)
sfcb-vmware_base[5821]: Timeout (or other socket error) waiting for response from provider
sfcb-vmware_base[5821]: Request Header Id (1927) != Response Header reqId (0) in request to provider 94 in process 4. Drop response.
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
Unknown: out of memory [7087]
NIC lights are normal (except no blinking since there's no traffic).
Tried a services.sh restart from the console but it didn't fix the problem. I did get a lot of errors during things like stopping ntpd and then restarting ntpd and starting ssh, "Connect to localhost failed: Connection failure".
One thing I did find from esxicli network nic list shows that the Intel e1000 driver is loaded on my Intel 82574L network card but the link status is down with a speed of 0. I tried unplugging the cable and then plugging it back in but the link didn't come back up. I tried esxcli network nic down(and up) -n vmnic1 but that didn't bring it back either.