Hardware health status monitoring is unstable and not displayed

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Hardware health status monitoring is unstable and not displayed.
• Resetting the sensors and event log does not resolve the issue.
• In the syslog.log, you see the entries similar to:

2017-12-03T20:30:37Z sfcb-vmware_base[1038465]: TIMEOUT DOING SHARED SOCKET RECV RESULT (1038465)
2017-12-03T20:30:37Z sfcb-vmware_base[1038465]: Timeout (or other socket error) waiting for response from provider
2017-12-03T20:30:37Z sfcb-vmware_base[1038465]: Header Id (380439) Request to provider 141 in process 5 failed. Error:Timeout (or other socket error) waiting for response from provider
2017-12-03T20:30:37Z sfcb-vmware_base[1038465]: Dropped response operation details -- nameSpace: root/cimv2, className: OMC_RawIpmiSensor, Type: 0

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Cause

This issue occurs because the sfcb-vmware_base is waiting for response from other provider and crashing due to timeout.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VMware ESXi 6.0.

Currently, there is no resolution.

Workaround:
To work around this issue, increase the memory pool size for the process running out of memory.

1. Stop the sfcbd service by running this command:
   
   /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog stop
    
2. Update the memory allocation by running this command:
   
   vsish -e set /sched/groups/<groupid>/memAllocationInMB minLimit=0 shares=1000 max=200
   
   Note: Provide the groupid of sfcb_aux and sfcb in the command.
    
3. Start the sfcbd service by running this command:
   
   /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start

Note: This change is not persistent and the configuration will be back to default after host reboot.