Hardware health sensors screen is blank for ESXi hosts

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

• During the ESXi boot, in the var/run/log/vmkernel.log you may find entries similar to:

cpu12:66644)WARNING: nipmi: ReadPhase:617: nipmi: Timed out waiting for OBF to set in read phase.. Error: Timeout
cpu12:66644)WARNING: nipmi: IpmiKcs_ProcessRequest:338: nipmi: Failure in KCS read phase. Error: Timeout
cpu12:66644)WARNING: nipmi: Process Request:1476: nipmi: A error while sending the IPMI request hardware, sending an IPMI failure response. Error: Timeout

Cause

This issue occurs when the IPMI Device on the hardware is not responding to IPMI commands 

Resolution

This could be a hardware firmware issue or the required settings related to IPMI are not enabled on the hardware. Engage respective Hardware vendor for further investigation.