I recently encountered the following behavior on VMware ESXi, where the following error was showing up :
Host storage status
But everything was showing all good on the iDRAC side and no apparent errors checking the datastore view in vCenter.
Then, looking at the Hardware Health on the host :
Monitor > Hardware Health > Sensors
Status for all drive were marked as “Warning”. I decided to look further by probing the IPMI with the following command on the ESXi host :
localcli hardware ipmi sdr list
The ouput will be extensive, look for “System Board X Drive X X” descriptors. Here is my output concerning the drives :
Node-Sensor Description Entity-Instance Computed Reading Base Unit Raw Reading Sensor Type Timestamp/Comment Raw Formatted-Raw ----------- --------------------------------- --------------- ------------------------ ------------------- ----------- --------------------------- ------------------- --- ------------- [...] 0.152 System Board 1 Drive 0 0 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.153 System Board 1 Drive 0 1 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.154 System Board 1 Drive 0 2 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.155 System Board 1 Drive 0 3 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.156 System Board 1 Drive 0 4 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.157 System Board 1 Drive 0 5 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.158 System Board 1 Drive 0 6 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.159 System Board 1 Drive 0 7 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.160 System Board 1 Drive 0 8 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.161 System Board 1 Drive 0 9 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.162 System Board 1 Drive 0 10 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.163 System Board 1 Drive 0 11 7.1 Parity Check in progress sensor-discrete 17 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.164 System Board 1 Drive 0 12 7.1 Drive Present sensor-discrete 1 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.165 System Board 1 Drive 0 13 7.1 Drive Present sensor-discrete 1 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 0.166 System Board 1 Drive 0 14 7.1 Drive Present sensor-discrete 1 Drive Slot / Bay 2023-05-19T02:07:21 [...]
Looking at the drive information, it turned out that the RAID array was doing a parity check, which was the trigger of this alarm. Since everything is working perfectly fine but with degraded performances due to the parity check, we can call it a “cosmetic” error that will vanish once the check is completed and successful.
Well, this is a 120 Tb array, it will take a few days to complete in this case!