"Host hardware voltage" on ESXi host

ak_v — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 12:30:47 GMT

Hi, there.

We have a host where an alarm "Host hardware voltage" is triggering regularly:

The trigger executes when the value of the "System Board 45 PVNN PCH" sensor is above 1.05 Volts:

I've checked IPMI sensors on the motherboard and they seem alright:

As we can see the related sensor "PVNN PCH" is within critical thresholds. Supermicro says nothing about this sensor. At least I didn't managed to find this information.

Also I didn't find at the official Intel chipset documentation "Intel C620 Series Chipset Platform Controller Hub (PCH)" what does this sensor mean, but I found out at "Intel 9 Series" the following table:

As far as I understood, according the article "Inaccurate Monitoring and Health Status seen in vSphere Web Client, vSphere Client, or vCenter Server (1010716)", VMWare retrieves values of Voltage sensors via IPMI. The article also says:

Some information available from the hardware vendors may be incorrectly or incompletely displayed in the VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client, vSphere Client, VirtualCenter, or vCenter Server.

I had decided to update IPMI and BIOS, but unfortunately it didn't help.

Did anyone run into this problem? Can we ignore the alert? May be there is a misconfiguration at BIOS parameters or somewhere else. Is any way to check/adjust this parameter (or related to this parameter) there?

Configuration:

OS	ESXi = 6.7.0, 14320388 VTC = 6.7.0.42000
Platform	Manufacturer = Supermicro Model = X11DPH-i CPU = 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4114
IPMI and BIOS	IPMI = 01.71.11 BIOS = 3.3
Location	The host is located in a data center with several ones. We don't have problems with cooling or power supply and other hosts are fine.

Re: "Host hardware voltage" on ESXi host

ak_v — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:55:10 GMT

Hi, there.

The problem was solved via reset configuration to default:

IPMI
1. Maintenance → Factory default
2. Select second option "Remove current settings and restore to factory default"
3. Restore

BIOS
- Supermicro recommends unplug a VBAT battery from a motherboard and plug it in.
  - At least there is a sense to reset BIOS remotely via IPMI.

Reset the IPMI is pretty safe because the network configuration will be preserved.

Thanks for Supermicro and VMWare support Teams.

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"Host hardware voltage" on ESXi host

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