Unknown sensor status in the vCenter Server Hardware status tab

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• vCenter Server Hardware Status tab reports an Unknown status for some sensors
• Unable to see hardware status from RAID Manager and Server View.
• In the /var/log/syslog.log log file, there are entries similar to:

sfcb-kmoduleprovider[3801020]: TIMEOUT DOING SHARED SOCKET RECV RESULT (3801020)

sfcb-kmoduleprovider[3801020]: Timeout (or other socket error) waiting for response from provider

sfcb-kmoduleprovider[3801020]: Header Id (294094) Request to provider 542 in process 11 failed. Error:Timeout (or other socket error) waiting for response from provider

sfcb-kmoduleprovider[3801020]: Dropped response operation details -- nameSpace: root/cimv2, className: VMware_Controller, Type: 0

• The issue can be resolved temporarily by restarting sfcbd, but then it reoccurs.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Cause

This issue occurs when the hardware monitoring service (sfcdb) does not work properly due to glibc deadlock issue.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in:

• ESXi 6.5, ESXi-6.5.0-update01, see VMware ESXi 6.5, Patch Release ESXi-6.5.0-update01.