Issue/Introduction

This article helps troubleshoot abnormal host CPU utilization caused by BMC or IPMI components in a nested ZSphere environment.

Symptoms

• A proof-of-concept environment reports a BMC failure or IPMI-related components causing abnormal CPU utilization.
• The environment actually runs inside a nested virtualization platform such as VMware.

Environment

• Product: ZVF
• Version: 4.x
• Component: ZSphere
• Affected object: IPMI or BMC
• Scenario: For host and hardware issues, confirm the current version, deployment type, storage type, and operation timeline.

Possible causes

• The nested environment has no actual BMC or IPMI capability, but platform components still attempt probing.
• Hardware information in the proof-of-concept environment differs from that on physical production hosts.
• Abnormal monitoring or IPMI collection retries cause additional resource consumption.

Resolution

Perform the following checks in order, and record the affected object, occurrence time, complete error message, and current status.

1. Confirm whether the environment is deployed on physical hosts or nested in VMware or another platform.
2. Check whether IPMI or BMC collection is configured when it is not required.
3. Mark proof-of-concept conclusions with the nested environment boundary. Do not directly extrapolate them to physical production hosts.
4. If the issue recurs in production, collect the actual BMC model, firmware, and collection logs.

Remediation

1. In a nested environment, when BMC or IPMI collection is not required, disable the corresponding collection configuration and observe CPU utilization changes.
2. If the same issue occurs on a physical production host, do not directly apply conclusions from the nested environment. Collect the BMC model, firmware, and logs, and then contact ZStack official technical support.

Verification

• After unnecessary collection configuration is disabled, CPU utilization on the affected host returns to the expected level.
• Management and hardware monitoring capabilities remain normal in production.