ESXI 6.5 & 6.7 Hardware health alarms from Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) sensors report false positives

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Some IPMI sensors might intermittently change from green to red and the reverse, which creates false hardware health alarms.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

Cause

False hardware health alarms generated from IPMI sensors.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in ESXI 6.5 U3 and ESXI 6.7 U2, available at VMware Downloads.

Workaround:
To work around this issue:

1. Connect to the ESXi host reporting the hardware health alarms using SSH
2. Determine the Node-Sensor ID, using the below command:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list
 

In this example, the Node-Sensor ID is 0.38 which corresponds to the sensor for Batter 2 36-Storage Batt.
 

3. Using this Node-Sensor ID you can use the advanced option command from that hosts CLI to ignore hardware health alarms from selected sensor:

esxcfg-advcfg -s 38 /UserVars/HardwareHealthIgnoredSensors

Note: Multiple sensors can be specified using comma separation e.g. 
esxcfg-advcfg -s 10,14,38 /UserVars/HardwareHealthIgnoredSensors
 

4. To see what sensors you have using this false flag you use the below advanced option command

esxcfg-advcfg -g /UserVars/HardwareHealthIgnoredSensors

Value of HardwareHealthIgnoredSensors is 38
 

Resetting these values requires you to log in using the vSphere Host Client directly on the host or through the vSphere Clients over the vCenter Server:

1. Select Manage > System > Advanced settings
2. Select UserVars.HardwareHealthIgnoredSensors 
3. Select Actions > Reset to default

Additional Information

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics for vSphere - FAQ