Monitoring PERC 6/i in vMware ESXi 5.5

Question

I currently have a Dell Poweredge 2950 running ESXi 5.5. My datastore is four drives in RAID 5 configured in the PERC 6/i config utility on bootup.

My question is, what do I do if/when one of these drives fail? Do I just pop it out and put in a replacement? Is there anything software wise I need to do? I've heard of Dell OpenManage but it looks like I cant install it without having a windows vcenter server, which wouldnt really make sense because I only have one ESXi server...

Any advice would be appreciated.

Solution 1

I'm sorry. With a single host, you won't have any proactive monitoring or email/SNMP alerts available for this system.

You can install the LSI or Dell Offline .VIB bundle to at least get hardware RAID health status to show up in your vSphere client.

Solution 2

Yup, so long as only a single disk has failed, you can just pull the blown disk, pop in a new one and the array should start rebuilding itself right away.

I suspect that Dell has created a VIB that you could load into ESXi that would give the Hardware tab greater visibility into your RAID config. I know HP does this, so hence why I suspect Dell would too.

Comments

[GregL]

Further, if the Dell VIB is anything like the HP one, a bad drive will trigger a vSphere alarm for the host so you'll know something has gone wrong.

[ewwhite]

No vCenter... so there's no alerting available.

[GregL]

Won't the host still throw an SNMP trap though?

[ewwhite]

I don't believe ESXi free will.

[GregL]

Interesting. I've worked with vSphere so long that I honestly can't remember. I'll check tomorrow.

[Steve]

How do I install the .VIB without update manager?

[GregL]

I'd recommend using PowerCLI, using either Get-ESXCLI or Install-VMHostPatch. You can also do it directly on the host with esxcli.