As VMware admins know, I hope you do, there are some hardware vendors which offer a customized VMware ESXi version for their hardware. Dell does so and HP does it as well. One would think that these versions are really customized for the hardware - and therefore better than the original ESXi, because the vendor knows it best. 

No. FAIL!

Australian sys/network admin Grant Davies (big thanks to down under!) and I just discovered after several days of tests, that the HP Customized ESXi 4.1 U1 ISO does not its job correctly on a HP Blade BL460c server. The OS seems to be running smooth, VM's are running fine but as soon as he wanted to use the Nagios plugin check_esxi_hardware, the plugin failed:

# ./check_esxi_hardware.py https://hpesxiserver root password hp
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "./check_esxi_hardware.py", line 137, in <module>
    instance_list = wbemclient.EnumerateInstances(classe)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_operations.py", line 404, in EnumerateInstances
    **params)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_operations.py", line 168, in imethodcall
    verify_callback = self.verify_callback)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/pywbem/cim_http.py", line 217, in wbem_request
    response = h.getresponse()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 986, in getresponse
    response.begin()
 File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 391, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 349, in _read_status
    line = self.fp.readline()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/socket.py", line 397, in readline
    data = recv(1)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 96, in <lambda>
    self.recv = lambda buflen=1024, flags=0: SSLSocket.recv(self, buflen, flags)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 217, in recv
    return self.read(buflen)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ssl.py", line 136, in read
    return self._sslobj.read(len)
KeyboardInterrupt

At first I thought the HP ESXi Offline Bundle was not installed, but it was. The vihostupdate.pl --query command clearly showed it. My next stupid (but correct!) idea was if the hardware status was shown in vSphere client or not. And to the surprise of both of us nothing was shown:

Conclusion: HP's customized ESXi 4.1 U1 ISO fails to install the CIM providers on an HP Blade 460c (G1). Maybe other server models are also affected, who knows.