A specific host reported as "Non-compliant" after ESXi upgrade by vLCM

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

After successfully completing an ESXi upgrade task using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), a specific host is flagged as "Non-compliant" during the post-remediation check.

Symptoms:

• The remediation process reaches 100% or completes, but the host status immediately reverts to "Non-compliant."
  
  
• The vmware-vum-server logs contain the following error and compliance metadata:
  
  

  com.vmware.vcIntegrity.lifecycle.RemediateClusterTask.HostNotCompliantAfterRemediation "errorMessage": "After host '<HOSTNAME>' remediation completed, compliance check reported host as 'non-compliant'. The image on the host does not match the image set for the cluster."

   
• Detailed compliance metadata after the error message indicates that specific hardware components (e.g., storage controllers or disks) are still reporting their previous firmware versions as the currentVersion, even though the hardware has been updated to the targetVersion.
  Example Compliance Scan Payload (Excerpt):
  
  

  {
    "action": "SCAN",
    "operationStatusCode": 200,
    "complianceScanMap": {
      "host-<ID>": {
        "fwCompliance": "NON-COMPLIANT",
        "deviations": [
          {
            "systemComponent": {
              "type": "EXTERNAL",
              "name": "Disk",
              "description": "Disk X of Storage Controller"
            },
            "compliance": "NON-COMPLIANT",
            "currentVersion": "1.0",
            "targetVersion": "1.1"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }

   
• Within the same log context or the detailed compliance scan output, the following flag is present: "finalRebootHwResetRequired": true

Environment

VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Cause

This issue may occur if the management layer (HSM) is unable to correctly retrieve or refresh the updated hardware inventory information immediately following the upgrade. Although the firmware is physically applied to the device, the management controller may require a hardware-level reset to re-scan the hardware bus and report the updated version string to vCenter.

Resolution

To synchronize the hardware inventory and resolve the non-compliant status:

1. Ensure the host remains in Maintenance Mode.
   
   
2. Reset the Out-of-Band (OOB) management controller (e.g., BMC or Service Processor).
   
   
3. Perform a Cold Boot or hard reset of the physical host to force a full hardware re-initialization.
   
   
4. After the host and management controller are back online, manually trigger a Check Compliance task in vLCM.
   
   
5. Once the status shows as Compliant, the host can be returned to service.

Additional Information

vLCM による ESXi アップグレード後、特定のホストが「非準拠 (Non-compliant)」とレポートされる (430147) (Japanese)