IBM 3650M2 “battery status alert”

Question

I have just installed a new 7 server cluster for a client... five servers are 3850M2 and the lasst two are 3650M2. All the servers play well together (vmotion etc) but we constantly have a battery status alert on the two 3650M2 servers.

IBM sent us new batteries before xmas which we swapped out (the batteries on the raid controller)... but here we are a week later with the same alert still present. vSphere appears in constant warning status telling us that the batteries are not charged.

Is this a known issue with vSphere on this model, or is there something we can do to remove this?... the interesting thing is that when I rebooted one of the hosts this morning so I could look in the Raid Configurator screen, it reports the batteries as fully charged.

Cheers

Answer 1

I've seen the same problem with ESX4 on Dell R710's with PERC 6i Controllers - it's (somewhat) erratic but affects all the hosts regularly. Other's have reported the same issue on the VMware Communities site in a number of threads like this one. I thought it was a bug limited to the PERC6i but it may be that this is an issue with VMware's hardware monitoring code in ESX 4.