Troubleshooting CIM on ESXi

Recently I’ve updated from to the latest 6.7 ESXi release . Afterthat , I have detected the following error messages flooding vmkernel.log

2021-10-30T06:49:17.261Z cpu9:2103791)User: 3173: sfcb-intelcim: wantCoreDump:sfcb-intelcim signal:11 exitCode:0 coredump:enabled
2021-10-30T06:49:17.472Z cpu9:2103791)UserDump: 3110: sfcb-intelcim: Dumping cartel 2103782 (from world 2103791) to file /var/core/sfcb-intelcim-zdump.001 ...

Before I manage to find a solution I have to verify a few things. Just a small background. sfcbd stands for “Small Footprint CIM Broker (SFCB) daemon”. For performance and health monitoring ESXi enables an agent less approach using industry standards like CIM (Common Information Model) and WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management). At the ESXi side, there is the CIM agent, represented by the sfcbd. CIM providers are the counter part, often supplied by 3^rd parties like hardware vendors. CIM providers come as .VIB files. After detecting 3^rd party CIM provider, the sfcbd (with that the WBEM services) is automatically started by ESXi.

To get an overview of the CIM providers installed, log in to the ESXi host as user root and run the commands:

# get CIM status 
esxcli system wbem get
   Authorization Model: password
   CIMObject Manager PID: 2101998
   Enabled: true
   Enabled Running SSLProtocols: tlsv1.2
   Enabled SSLProtocols:
   Enabled System SSLProtocols: tlsv1.2
   Loglevel: warning
   Port: 5989
   Service Location Protocol PID: 0
   WSManagement PID: 2101662
   WSManagement Service: true

#get CIM provider list with status  
esxcli system  wbem  provider list
Name              Enabled  Loaded
----------------  -------  ------
sfcb_base            true    true
vmw_base             true    true
vmw_hdr              true    true
vmw_iodmProvider     true    true
vmw_kmodule          true    true
vmw_omc              true    true
vmw_pci              true    true
vmw_smx-provider     true    true 

Since sfcb was crashing and the crash was caused by sfcb-intelcim provider I’ve decided to remove that module but alternatively you can disable it.

# uninstall package intelcim-provider that was causing issues 
/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog stop
esxcli software vib list | grep -i intel
esxcli software vib remove -n intelcim-provider 
/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start
#ref https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00048925en_us&docLocale=en_US

# alternatively provider can be disabled 
sxcli system  wbem  provider set --enable false --name="intelcim-provider"

Once intelcim-provider has been removed dump file was created anymore.  I hope this was useful.