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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.

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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.

enter image description here

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  • 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.
    – GregL
    Mar 8, 2015 at 22:11
  • No vCenter... so there's no alerting available.
    – ewwhite
    Mar 8, 2015 at 22:19
  • Won't the host still throw an SNMP trap though?
    – GregL
    Mar 8, 2015 at 22:28
  • I don't believe ESXi free will.
    – ewwhite
    Mar 8, 2015 at 22:43
  • Interesting. I've worked with vSphere so long that I honestly can't remember. I'll check tomorrow.
    – GregL
    Mar 9, 2015 at 1:22
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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.

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As ewwhite and GregL already mentioned, install the OpenMange VIB within your ESXi. This also works great on the ESXi Free, but you need do do it at the commandline.

For automated monitoring, we use check_openmanage - a great nagios/icinga/etc-plugin which is talking directly to the OpenMange-Daemon running on your ESXi. It also works great with OpenManage installed on Windows or Linux if you don't have virtualization.

For manually monitor your system, install OMSA. Its great to check almost everything on your server and also do maintenance-tasks like change hot-spare disk, create new arrays and so on.

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I monitor LSI raid controller by MegaRaid and strocli. Easy to use.

LSI 1078 SAS OEM IBM MR10xx have the same ship(LSI SAS 1078) with Dell PERC6.

Monitoring MegaRAID Controllers in VMware

StorCLI Installation unter ESXi 5.5 und ESXi 6.0

Because LSI 1078 is too old, I think megaraid is a good choice.

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