The purpose of Hardware Health Tab is to report only IPMI Sensors that have actual health state. 

This displays IPMI Sensor status of the hardware running on ESXi and provide current statistics such as Fan RPM, CPU temperature, power supply voltage and battery status.

This data is provided by PC hardware IPMI (Baseboard Management Controller) using the /dev/ipmi0 driver which supplies Sensor Data Record (SDR) and current readings, System Event Log (SEL) entries and Field Replaceable Unit  (FRU)part numbers.

This tab immediately displays an operator on the sensors which have failed and to make it evident which sensors are currently reporting normal health state but had failed recently.

Symptoms:

• The Hardware Health tab from the vCenter Server 6.5 User is not placing IPMI Sensors into the same groups as prior vCenter Server releases.
   
• Some groups (such as BMC, PCI) are not populated.

VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x

Starting with ESXi 6.5, WBEM services are disabled by default unless third party CIM Provider VIBs are installed. The ESXi host agent now provides IPMI data directly to the vCenter Server Hardware Health tab using a public VSPHERE API HostConfigManager.healthStatusSystem managed object. 


ESXi host agent updates the data every 90 seconds. In previous vCenter Server releases, data was updated once every five minutes. Grouping of IPMI SDRs is based on what the hardware reports each sensor the IPMI Entity ID, a simple ordinal number.


This number can be seen from the ESXi shell with this command:


esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list

Some hardware vendors will use Entity ID yet other vendors may use a Sensor Type value. So depending on the hardware vendor, sensors can be grouped differently.

Empty groups such as BMC and PCI do not report health state, but simply report configuration. The green health state icon would never actually become red. They do not have health status state as such and are no longer reported with IPMI Sensor data. This data is or will be available from other screens in the User Interface. 

For operators upgrading from earlier vCenter Server release is what appears to be fewer items being monitored when in fact prior versions inserted objects into the Hardware Health tab that did not have any health data to report such as software packages (VIB) and PCI bus components.

Note: The Host Client User Interface provides a new and improved tabular view of IPMI Sensors and only sensors that report a health state.It integrates System Event Log entries per sensor so that unstable sensors are more easily detected. Finally, the UI allows sorting on multiple columns. Yet vCenter Server UI has not been updated to use the new display format so grouping SDRs remains an issue.

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Impact/Risks:
Monitoring Hardware from the vCenter Server Hardware Health Tab does not yet have the updated user interface.