John, When the server is performing updates on the firmware of a device, it must restart that device. The downtime you are experiencing is due to the firmware copying, loading, and restarting the device.  When you see this it is the NIC specifically that is causing the outage, it isn't the whole server downing at once. Just the nic at that moment. Now there are devices that will cause the system to need to be rebooted after running, which is BIOS, ESM, chipset, and drac.  Normally after running the SUU, you will want to restart to ensure all the newer versions are running.
Hi, From within Windows (2008R2), when updating the NIC using SUU, why does the server not respond to Ping for about a min? Is the server actually off-line completely during this update? Thx John Bradshaw  [IMAGE]
Updating NIC in Windows takes server offline for about 60 secs