"Health: Miss counters detected" alerts for Mellanox driver on ESXi 8.0.2 and 8.0.3

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

On ESXi 8.0.2 and 8.0.3 , you will see the below alert reported for the Mellanox driver:

"nmlx5_QueryNicVportContext:188 command failed: IO was aborted"

The vmkernel logs will show the below entries at random times:

<NMLX_ERR> nmlx5_core: 0000:45:00.0: Health: Miss counters detected.
<NMLX_INF> synd 0x0: unrecognized error
<NMLX_INF> extSynd 0x0000
<NMLX_ERR> nmlx5_QueryNicVportContext:188 command failed: IO was aborted
<NMLX_ERR> nmlx5_QueryVportCounter:1851 command failed: IO was aborted

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

This is known bug in the nmlx5 health mechanism logic where the driver incorrectly detects NIC is in faulty state.

Resolution

Issue is fixed in the inbox driver for VCF 9.0 (nmlx5 version: 4.24.0.7) and will also be available in ESXi 8.0 patch 05.