Monitoring local drives - ESXi 5.5 Dell H310

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denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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I thought I posted this a while back but can't find the thread.. apologies if duplicated.

I'm running ESXi 5.5 with 2 Dell PERC H310 HBA's. I have 3 Virtual Devices, 2 RAID 1 and 1 RAID 10 presented as VMFS datastores.

How does everyone monitor their disk drive health? I installed the VMware megaraid driver VIB on my ESXi server and still don't see "storage" in the hardware tab of the vSphere client.

I need to be able to see the health data and them put some alerting in place. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

example after installing megaraid - still no smart data:
Code:
# esxcli storage core device smart get -d naa.690b11c02349cc001c49bdca0ee1e63c
Parameter                     Value  Threshold  Worst
----------------------------  -----  ---------  -----
Health Status                 N/A    N/A        N/A
Media Wearout Indicator       N/A    N/A        N/A
Write Error Count             N/A    N/A        N/A
Read Error Count              N/A    N/A        N/A
Power-on Hours                N/A    N/A        N/A
Power Cycle Count             N/A    N/A        N/A
Reallocated Sector Count      N/A    N/A        N/A
Raw Read Error Rate           N/A    N/A        N/A
Drive Temperature             N/A    N/A        N/A
Driver Rated Max Temperature  N/A    N/A        N/A
Write Sectors TOT Count       N/A    N/A        N/A
Read Sectors TOT Count        N/A    N/A        N/A
Initial Bad Block Count       N/A    N/A        N/A
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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Will the OMSA VIB work on a supermicro system using H310 HBA's ?
My server is supermicro not dell.

thanks
 

NetWise

Active Member
Jun 29, 2012
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Edmonton, AB, Canada
Pretty sure it'll just load the MIB's and figure out what devices are present. Is this a production box and the only one? If not give it a try. Uninstalling is simple enough. I have to verify how or if I got it working I know I had tried. I have a C2100 with PERC H700 so similar situation as OMSA does nothing on DCS servers.
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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This is my only box and definitely would painful if I had to rebuild it. I'm surprised it so difficult to monitor local drives. Right now I have zero visibility into the health of my raid groups and if a drive did fail I would have no idea it happened not to mention identifying which drive failed.

Am I approaching this the correct way? Is smart data the appropriate information for monitoring raid/drive health?

Thanks
 

cptbjorn

Member
Aug 16, 2013
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I have a H310 that is flashed to lsi 9211 ir mode and it reports disk health using the lsi smis provider on ESXi 5.5. I can't see the actual smart data for the SSDs that are in RAID sets but presumably I'd know if one of the SSDs failed.
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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I thought the H310 with LSI 9211 IR flash doesn't support raid. I actually flashed back to Perc to support my raid10 group. Does the lsi smis provider apply to the Dell Perch flash?
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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I installed 7.4 OMSA VIB and the Windows Admin client on my PC.
I'm still not seeing the drives through the H310's. Under OMSA "Storage" I get "No controllers detected".
If I go to OMSA "Main System Chasis" under "slots" I see both my HBA's listed as "MegaRAID SAS 2008 [Falcon]".

Any idea what I'm missing here?
 

Rhinox

Member
May 27, 2013
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Any idea what I'm missing here?
SMIS-provider maybe? But I do not think you can get smart-status directly (with esxcli), as drives are hidden behind raid-arrays. But you could try storcli/megacli...
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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Hi all -
I still haven't been successful in getting visibility to the physical drives for error reporting. I'm at a loss with this. Without drive monitoring I'm very hesitant to go all in with picutres, music, personal files, etc. Anyone have any ideas on how I can overcome this? Would updating my Dell HBA's to a new version like 710's? I wouldn't mind replacing my 310's anyway for vmware performance. I really appreciate any help I can get. Thanks
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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I added the LSI vib and it looks like I have some storage information under ESXi. Still cannot access drive SMART data from esxcli.
Can someone help me interrupter what I'm looking at? On one HBA I have 6 4TB drives in Raid10 and 2 SSD drives Raid1. Second HBA I have 2 SSD's in Raid1. Thank you.

 

Rhinox

Member
May 27, 2013
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Simply put, you can not get smart-status of drives forming raid-array, used as datastore for ESXi. What you see in Configuraton->HealthStatus is all you get.

You "might" get smart values with smartmontools, if you passthrough the whole virtual drive to some linux-VM (ESXi does not use smartmontools). But even this is more or less experimental, and does not work for all controllers...
 

denisl

Member
Dec 20, 2014
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Thanks for the reply. How would I create an alert if I lost a physical HDD? I guess no predictive analysis can be done?

Is there a better HBA I can use that would provide more visibility to the HDD in raid group?
Thank you