I have a Dell PowerEdge T710 w/ an integrated PERC H700 RAID controller. I am running two 500 gig hard drives off the machine in a mirrored raid. The entire machine is running VMWare ESXI 4 and I access the machine thru Vsphere.
It is running 24/7 and I was wondering how do I actually know if the mirrored RAID fails and I need to swap in a new drive?!
Thanks for any help to this very newbie question.
ESXi on fully supported hardware from any of the major vendors will generate RAID controller alerts visible in the VI CLient. Since the H700 on the HCL I'd be very surprised if it didn't provide alerts, the older PERC6 cards definitely do, sometimes to the point of being annoying. It would be nice if VMware (or anyone else) would provide a definitive list of what level of fault reporting their built in hardware health monitoring can actually provide for each device but that's not something I've ever been able to find.
This would be a lot easier to figure out if ESXi supported SNMP but it doesn't unfortunately, you have to use WBEM\CIM which is not quite as easy to enable and interact with. The Nagios\Python script referenced in my answer to this related question might give you some better information if you can get it working.
Dell have a reasonably useful document here on the various steps you can take to enable more advanced monitoring through the Open Manage Server Administrator agent on ESX & ESXi V4\4.1 that you can work through if you want to fully enable remote monitoring on your ESXi hosts. Even with this you are limited to CIM\WBEM and SNMP traps, SNMP queries don't work on ESXi.
You can install OpenManage Server Administrator on the ESX host and use it to monitor the system and alert you if a drive fails.
There is an install guide here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smsom/6.2/en/omsa_ig/html/instesxi.htm#wp10982link text85
There is a very similar question in the answers to Monitoring hardware RAID on VMWare ESXi
For a R710 running VMware products I like to use the Dell software to alert me. You will install Dell OpenManage, configure the alarms, give the DRAC and IP, send messages to your smtp server/the desired mail group/individual. This way if you have any hardware fail OpenManage will know, because that's its job, then the DRAC will send the mail off because close to worse case the server is down but the DRAC still has power and can alert.
1)Go to support.dell.com. Select the R710 as your system, or enter the service tag. Select your OS in the drop-down. Download Dell OpenManage System Administrator (stand alone). 2)Install via mounting the ISO from vCenter or make a physical disk and connect to the DVD drive in vCenter 3)Do the express install. You may have to restart the esx mgt services and/or the dell services. 4)Connect to OpenMange via a browser https://your server IP or DNS name:1311 5)Configure Openmange (setup alarms, setup SMTP server) 6)Setup the DRAC in OpenManage - give it an IP and change the default/root password 4)Connect to the DRAC side in a web browswer and check the configuration.
Alerts will now come off the box from your DRAC IP. After all the mail is setup do a test by pulling 1 power cable and reconnecting. You should see 4 mails come off the box (power redundancy degraded, power redundancy lost, then it coming back) - Just a simple test to make sure you are getting the mail through.
You can get few information regarding RAID storage from vSphere API itself. Try vSphere API but only limited information will be retrieved from the RAID device.
