Monitoring hardware RAID on VMWare ESXi

Question

I've got an ESXi 3.5 server on "unsupported" hardware - SuperMicro motherboard, Adaptec 9410 3405 RAID controller (oops, the 9410 is the onboard controller that's not being used for RAID) - and I'm starting to wonder what the point of RAID is, because we don't have any monitoring on it.

Is it possible to have monitoring of RAID on ESXi apart from 100% compatible systems / using a paid product like vSphere, or should we switch to an "endorsed" hardware system or perhaps a SAN?

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Update: I've found this Adaptec knowledge base article which says that ESXi has no monitoring support:

There is a AACRAID driver embedded in ESXi Server 3.5 (see VMware Certified Compatibility Guides) but there is no Management Software (ASM or ARCCONF) available.

The card does however have diagnostic LEDs with headers, so I suppose some sort of hardware hack might be a last resort.

Solution 1

Of course ESXi has thorough and extensive hardware monitoring support (that article talks about one Adaptec-flavour of monitoring). I can tell you everything that's going on in every part of my fully supported hardware, if Adaptec make an ESX/ESXi driver for your adapter with hardware RAID support then it'll pass pre-failure and failure warnings up to ESX/ESXi which can then in turn forward them on either via vCenter or SNMP.

Solution 2

I am not sure about ESXi monitoring the raid but does your supermicro have a management card? those generaly have SNMP and you can easily monitor the Raid, fans etc.

going with fully supported hardware + SAN would be ideal in production environments if you need it.

Most of our Virtual stuff is on Dell R710 with Dell Equalogic PS6000e's for storage - the combo works great. plenty of monitoring and excellent performance/RoI etc.

Comments

[Will Dixon]

It seems that several are available: supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/sim.cfm - will definitely look into it.

[Dirk Paessler]

I think ESXi only supports WBEM (no SNMP)

[MShoubaki]

The supermicro management cards do not get you access to RAID card information, in my experience.

[Will Dixon]

I think this will have to be the answer I accept - what we really need is fully supported hardware.

[Aaron Hudon]

I am reviwing late answers, and for this I would suggest you can improve it with beeing more specific (like a link to how to patch it or a command to do it). Otherwise It is a helpful contribution. Thank you.