I did not find anything in the vmkernel log file with 'dissociate' entries. I also grepped for 'vmnic4' and didn't find anything.
I did speak with VMware support and was able to reproduce all these issues with them. We did some packet captures and found no arp responses from the physical switch and they think the MAC address table is not updating. VMware wants me to do packet captures on the physical switches but I'll have to involve my network team for that. No other updates since that call earlier.
Has anyone had any bad experiences with the qfle3 driver? From what I understand that is the main difference between an older version of ESXi we were using the bnx2x driver and now this host is using the qfle3 driver.