Why did be2net driver fail to initialize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7?

Issue

• Emulex be2net 10GbE network cards fail to initialize on RHEL 5.7, but they worked on RHEL 5.6.
• The following errors are logged on boot:

be2net 0000:10:00.0: Error in cmd completion - opcode 103, compl 2, extd 30df630040
be2net 0000:10:00.0: Error in cmd completion - opcode 90, compl 2, extd 300df630140
be2net 0000:10:00.0: Emulex OneConnect 10Gbps NIC initialization failed
be2net: probe of 0000:10:00.0 failed with error -1

• The devices do not initialise, can cannot be started with ifup:

# ifup eth0
Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring