High pNic error rate detected on Mellanox network adapter.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Random ESXi hosts have the following alert: High pNic error rate detected on vmnic.

Issue is observed in hosts having Mellanox adapters. 

However, the environment is not facing any impact due to this alert. 

Cause

We checked the logs for vmnic statistics and we see a high number of CRC errors as well as receive missed errors on the reported vmnic. The issue persists even after the ring size was increased to 8192 on these network adapters.

Resolution

If there is no impact, you can proceed to suppress the alert using the steps below:

You can refer the below technical document to set the threshold alert individually on the vmnics:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsan/vsan/8-0/vsan-monitoring/monitor-the-vsan-cluster/using-the-vsan-default-alarms/view-vsan-network-alarms.html

The below are the recommended VSAN threshold values:
1. Warning: 1% (default: 0.1%)
2. Critical: 3% (default: 1%)