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On ESX/ESXi 4.0, A TPM-related warning is issued even though TPM is unavailable on the system

Details

In this scenario, a system alert such as the following is issued:
SysAlert: Initialization for tpm_tis failed with -19

The preceding warning message indicates that the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) driver failed to load on the given system. However, in many cases TPM is not installed on the system or is disabled. Therefore, in such cases, the message does not relate to the status of the system.

ESX does not use TPM, but the TPM driver might still attempt to load on ESX.
ESXi uses TPM, if available and enabled from the BIOS, to attest the running vmkernel to the Virtual Center.

If TPM is not available on the platform (for example it might be disabled from the BIOS), the feature will not be functional on ESXi. If this message is issued anyway, TPM might not be installed on the platform at all; however, the BIOS might still be capable of supporting TPM.

You might see this error because the module loader does not check for the status of the TPM before trying to load.

Solution

In cases where TPM is unavailable or disabled, this message is completely harmless and can be safely ignored.

This issue is resolved in ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 1.

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