Unconfigured Disk : Disk Error - The physical element is failing on HPE Smary Array Controllers

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• HPE Smart Array SR Gen10 Controllers - Additional Disks Are Displayed In ESXi /vCenter GUI and smx-provider Errors Are Logged On Platforms Configured With Controllers With FW v3.53 (Or Later)
• Errors show "The physical element is failing" or "Unconfigured Disk" for physically absent slots

Environment

6.x
7.x

Cause

• Incompatibility between the smx providers vib and HPE firmware leads to false alerts being generated
  
  
• Logging shows sfcb-smx process crashing and generating a dump file like sfcb-smx-zdump in the /var/core directory

vmkernel.log

MemSchedAdmit: 478: UserWorld 'sfcb-smx' with cmdline '/bin/sfcbd'
MemSchedAdmit: 489: uw.2100562 (12781) extraMin/extraFromParent: 256/256, smx (11852) childEmin/eMinLimit: 17861/17920
User: 3173: sfcb-smx: wantCoreDump:sfcb-smx signal:6 exitCode:0 coredump:enabled
UserDump: 3110: sfcb-smx: Dumping cartel 2100562 (from world 2100566) to file /var/core/sfcb-smx-zdump.000 ...
UserDump: 3258: sfcb-smx: Userworld(sfcb-smx) coredump complete.

Resolution

To resolve the issue the smx providers must be uninstalled from the host via the following steps:

1. Remove the VIB from ESXI
   
   For VMware ESXi 6.5 / 6.7
   
   esxcli software vib remove -n smx-provider
   
   For VMware ESXi 7.0
   
   esxcli software component remove -n smxProvider
   
   
2. Reboot for the changes to be effective

Additional Information

Please refer to the HPE Advisory below for further information:

Advisory: (Revision) HPE Smart Array SR Gen10 Controllers - Additional Disks Are Displayed In ESXi /vCenter GUI and smx-provider Errors Are Logged On Platforms Configured With Controllers Using FW v3.53 (Or Later)