IPMI sensor names with VMware ESXi

[Paul Fertser]

Hello,

We're facing what might be an interoperability issue between OpenBMC
sensors exposed via IPMI to the host system and VMware ESXi (version
7.0u2).

The official document[0] states "All hardware sensors that conform to
the IPMI standard are collected. Third parties do not need to add
software providers to take advantage of this functionality."

And indeed they are collected but the web-interface, WBEM via https
and "esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list" all give "Unspecified 1" for all
the IPMI sensors "captions". At the same time "/opt/ipmitool/ipmitool
sdr list" from https://vswitchzero.com/ipmitool-vib/ shows all the
names properly.

When the M.2 SSD with this system is removed from our server and
installed into a very similar Wiwynn Tioga Pass board running AMI
MegaRAC and their UEFI implementation, all the sensor names appear
without any tweaks.


I'm having hard time trying to obtain any related documentation or
source code, can't for the life of me find any clue about their CIM
configuration. Is it using some undocumented SMBIOS entries (I see a
bunch (117) of "type 192, 23 bytes" but no idea if that's related)? Or
probably some ACPI tables? Or something specific it doesn't like about
OpenBMC's IPMI implementation?


Surely it's not the first time OpenBMC is used with ESXi so please
share your hints.


[0] http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/hwhm41_technote.pdf
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