Hardware Health Status shows Unknown state when System Event Log entries are grown

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Hardware Health Status screen shows Unknown state if the BMC of the server platform has a lot of System Event Log (SEL) entries.
• In the syslog.log file, you see the entries similar to:

YYYY-MM-DDTH:MM:SEC:MsecZ sfcb-vmware_base[35495]: spGetMsg receiving from 47 35495-11 Resource temporarily unavailable

YYYY-MM-DDTH:MM:SEC:MsecZ sfcb-vmware_base[35495]: rcvMsg receiving from 47 35495-11 Resource temporarily unavailable

YYYY-MM-DDTH:MM:SEC:MsecZ sfcb-vmware_base[35495]: Timeout or other socket error

<snip>

YYYY-MM-DDTH:MM:SEC:MsecZ sfcb-vmware_base[35495]: TIMEOUT DOING SHARED SOCKET RECV RESULT (35495)
 

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

Environment

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

Cause

SFCB has CPU and memory limit when running providers. For SEL, the vmware_raw provider's CPU and memory usage depends on the amount of SEL entries. If the number is too large, the vmware_raw provider may spend much time reading them which may cause communication timeout between SFCB manager and provider

Resolution

To resolve this issue, clear the old System Event Log entries by running this command:

localcli hardware ipmi sel clear