Storage sensor health state degraded

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information and workaround for the hardware health alarms getting triggered (for Storage sensor) on ESXi hosts

Symptoms:

• In the vSphere UI Client > vCenter Server > Cluster > Host > Monitor > Events, you see entries similar to:

Storage sensor health state degraded

• The Export of Alarm from above event shows following messages 

Alert Definition Name: Storage sensors are reporting problems
Alert Definition Description: One or more storage sensors on the host are reporting problems. Specific details should be available in the symptom details. For more information, check the Hardware Status of the host in vSphere Client.
Object Name : ESXI FQDN
Object Type : HostSystem
Alert Impact: health
Alert State : critical
Alert Type : Hardware (OSI)
Alert Sub-Type : Availability
Object Health State: 4.0
Object Risk State: 1.0
Object Efficiency State: 1.0
Control State: Open
Symptoms:
SYMPTOM SET - self

Hardware sensor health state degraded. Sensor information: Type = storage, ID = <>, Name = Disk Drive Bay <> HDD<> 1, PartName = N/A, PartNumber = N/A, Manufacturer = N/A

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 7.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 8.x

Cause

• The error is due to hardware issue

Resolution

Reach out to the hardware vendor for further investigation 

To work around this issue,

You can avoid this issue by disabling the WBEM services. To disable the WBEM  services on the ESXi host, run this command:

Note: The VMware Host Hardware (WBEM) sensor monitors information about the hardware of an ESXi server using Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM).

# esxcli system wbem set --enable false

To re-enable the CIM agent on the ESXi host, run this command:

# esxcli system wbem set --enable true

Note: When an ESXi host is rebooted and if a 3rd party providers are present, the WBEM service will become enabled on reboot. In this instance, the step of disabling WBEM services will have to be repeated. However, this can be avoided by turning off the sfcbd-watchdog in chkconfig. 

To turn off sfcbd-watchdog from chkconfig, run this command:

# chkconfig sfcbd-watchdog off