Dell Server Running Vmware. How do I know when mirrored RAID fails?

Question

I have a Dell PowerEdge T710 w/ an integrated PERC H700 RAID controller. I am running two 500 gig hard drives off the machine in a mirrored raid. The entire machine is running VMWare ESXI 4 and I access the machine thru Vsphere.

It is running 24/7 and I was wondering how do I actually know if the mirrored RAID fails and I need to swap in a new drive?!

Thanks for any help to this very newbie question.

Solution 1

ESXi on fully supported hardware from any of the major vendors will generate RAID controller alerts visible in the VI CLient. Since the H700 on the HCL I'd be very surprised if it didn't provide alerts, the older PERC6 cards definitely do, sometimes to the point of being annoying. It would be nice if VMware (or anyone else) would provide a definitive list of what level of fault reporting their built in hardware health monitoring can actually provide for each device but that's not something I've ever been able to find.

This would be a lot easier to figure out if ESXi supported SNMP but it doesn't unfortunately, you have to use WBEM\CIM which is not quite as easy to enable and interact with. The Nagios\Python script referenced in my answer to this related question might give you some better information if you can get it working.

Dell have a reasonably useful document here on the various steps you can take to enable more advanced monitoring through the Open Manage Server Administrator agent on ESX & ESXi V4\4.1 that you can work through if you want to fully enable remote monitoring on your ESXi hosts. Even with this you are limited to CIM\WBEM and SNMP traps, SNMP queries don't work on ESXi.

Solution 2

You can install OpenManage Server Administrator on the ESX host and use it to monitor the system and alert you if a drive fails.

There is an install guide here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smsom/6.2/en/omsa_ig/html/instesxi.htm#wp10982link text85

Comments

[Chadddada]

Yeah I have looked into using CIM SMASH, Nagios\Python scripting... but in the end Dell OpenMange was pretty easy to setup and use with VMware baremetal products.