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I have servers on an IAAS environment, and am wondering if I'd need disk monitoring (Which would monitor the temp etc on a disk in a SAN)?

In my VM, do I need to have disk monitoring software?

Also, do drivers need to be updated?

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You could run normal file system checks within the VM just as you would with any machine to ensure file system integrity. However, within the VM, I wouldn't try to do any S.M.A.R.T. or other hardware-level monitoring, as it would all be testing virtual hardware that doesn't really exist (if the tests work at all?).

However, on your physical servers / hosts, I would do whatever hardware-level monitoring you do with any other server. If your disks start failing, you have the potential to loose the host O.S. with all the VMs being hosted on them as well.

Regardless, I trust you have a proper backup strategy in place.

For drivers, yes, I'd use the "best available" drivers on both the host, as well as the client. Whatever software you're using for virtualization should provide documentation for the best available drivers within the VM - matching whatever hardware is being emulated to the VM.

However, without knowing any details for what software and solutions you're using, this is all very subjective.

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In a vm, do I need to have disk monitoring software?

For physical things like bad sectors/temperature, etc? No. This is usually abstracted from the VM. Even if you tried, you wouldn't see the info of the actual disks sitting in a remote rack somewhere.

Also, do drivers need to be updated?

Usually not if you're given this host pre-installed from your provider, but this is by no means universal. If you have questions, you should contact your host.

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On VMs your "Disk" is usually not a disk but a virtual device, which is either a file, an iSCSI Volume, an LVM Volume or something like that.

I'd also consider this to be the case for you, as you're saying its on a SAN. That means that there is some machine(s) with numerous disks with Storage Volumes on top of them which they serve out to other machines via a block based network protocol, which they then mount as if they were local and those may serve out again to yet some other machines via a standard network transfer protocol like NFS, SMB or whatever.

This means, that your disk is not a disk, but more of a file residing on a storage volume on the network, which itself resides on a bunch of disks.

This also means, that disk monitoring is something that is being taken care of somewhere else and also, that you'd probably only get bogus data (if you'd get any at all) from any sort of disk monitoring.

You can do file system checks though, of course, as something could still happen there due to a bug or some other not forseeable reason.

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