Hardware Health Integration Testing Procedure

Hardware Health Integration Testing Procedure for IPMI based Systems

Starting with ESXi version 6.5U2 and into 6.7 and beyond, the vSPHERE software stack consumes hardware health
telemetry directly from "BMC" directly without use of WBEM/Web Based Enterprise Management layer. This change
was communicated to customers and partners at VMworld 2018[1].

Now that WBEM layer is not used by vSPHERE stack this document serves as a replacement for existing CIMPAT
set of tests which were used to validate integration between hardware and ESXi. It is intended for
partners to use to create their own verification scheme to check what is being reported by VMware interfaces
(CLI and GUI) is what partners expect and that the values reported are correct/match vendor specific
interfaces.

This document provides a description of the overall hardware monitoring model,
a description of the applications that consume IPMI data that run in ESXi and finally
a step by step description of how VMware would prefer partners test their systems
with ESXi hypervisor.

This document has a companion video demonstrating the test methodology shown here,
please refer to the video for examples shown in the test section below.