Error: Sensor Drive Mismatch has transitioned to critical on Lenovo ThinkSystem in vSAN environment

Products

• VMware vSAN
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Users observe a hardware critical alert on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers participating in a vSAN cluster. The issue manifests as follows:

• Hardware Alert (XCC/iLO): 
  • Sensor Drive Mismatch has transitioned to critical from a less severe state.

• ESXi Hardware Logs: 
  • Running esxcli hardware ipmi sel list shows: 

Record: 27
Record Id: 2735.191
When: 2026-05-26T00:48:59
Event Type: 7 (Fatal/NonRecoverable)
SEL Type: 2 (System Event)
Message: Assert + Drive Slot Transition to Critical from less severe
Sensor Number: 222

• vSAN Health: 
  • The vSAN Skyline Health Service reports Healthy status.
  • Disks are detected, assigned, and actively participating in the datastore without performance degradation or object accessibility issues.

Environment

• VMware ESXi 8.x
• VMware ESXi 9.x

Cause

• The issue originates from the server hardware/firmware layer and is external to the VMware ESXi/vSAN software. This sensor alert is a known condition for Lenovo ThinkSystem (e.g., SR630, SR650) often related to:
  • RAID controller (e.g., 940 series) drive recognition inconsistencies.
  • NVMe drive compatibility or communication timeout with the backplane.
  • Firmware/Controller level mismatch conditions.

• The error matches known Lenovo documented hardware issues described in the following vendor KBs:

1. 1. Error "Sensor drive mismatch has transitioned to critical from a less severe state" in XCC event and u.3 NVMe SSD cannot be recognized by RAID 940 adapter in Tri mode - Lenovo ThinkSystem
   2. XCC Sensor Drive Mismatch has transitioned to critical from a less severe state - Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 (7X01, 7X02)
   3. FQXSPUN0019M: Sensor Drive Mismatch has transitioned to critical from a less severe state
   4. FQXSPUN0068M : [DriveName] Mismatch has transitioned to critical from a less severe state

Resolution

Engage the hardware vendor (Lenovo) for further investigation and remediation of the hardware sensor mismatch condition.