C6100 IPMI Issues with vSphere 6

So I’m not 100% certain if the issues I’m having on my C6100 server are vSphere 6 related or not.  But I have seen similar issues before in my lab, so it may be one of a few things.

After a recent upgrade, I noted that some of my VM’s seemed “slow” – which is hard to quantify.  Then this morning I wake up to having internet but no DNS, so I know my DC is down.  Hosts are up though.  So I give them a hard boot, connect to the IPMI KVM, and watch the startup.  To see “loading IPMI_SI_SRV…” and it just sitting there.

In the past, this seemed to be related to a failing SATA disk, and the solution was to pop it up – which helped temporarily until I replaced the disk outright.  But these are new drives.  Trying the same here did not work, though I only tried the spinning disks and not the SSD’s.  Rather than mess around, I thought I’d find a way to see if I could disable IPMI at least to troubleshoot.

Turns out, I wasn’t alone – though just not specific to vSphere 6:

https://communities.vmware.com/message/2333989

http://www.itblah.com/installing-or-upgrading-to-vmware-vsphere-hypervisor-5-esxi-5-using-the-interactive-method/

https://xuri.me/2014/12/06/avoid-vmware-esxi-loading-module-ipmi_si_drv.html

That last one is the option I took:

• Press SHIFT+O during the Hypervisor startup
• Append “noipmiEnabled” to the boot args

Which got my hosts up and running. 

I haven’t done any deeper troubleshooting, nor have I permanently disabled the IPMI with the options of:

Manually turn off or remove the module by turning the option “VMkernel.Boot.ipmiEnabled” off in vSphere or using the commands below:

# Do a dry run first:
esxcli software vib remove –dry-run —vibname ipmi–ipmi–si–drv
# Remove the module:
esxcli software vib remove —vibname ipmi–ipmi–si–drv

We’ll see what comes when I get more time…