HP Microserver / ESX5 and P410

[chrisjcbt]

Morning all, I'm struggling to get help from HP's support groups at the moment (mainly becuase I think my issues spread across multiple HP support groups). So - I'm hoping people here can help:

Background

I am sucessfully running ESX 5 (VMWare build) on an HP Microserver, I have 3 SATA disks configured in RAID5 using a P410 controller, and the base system is managed remotely via the HP Remote Access card. All in all - it works exremely well and I'm delighted. But for the two issues below:

1. P410 RAID status

The only way to find the status of the RAID volume is by rebooting the ESX host and watching the BIOS screen. Does anyone know how I can get better reporting of the RAID status - SNMP, HTTP, Syslog or CLI? I have tried the HP pre-packaged version of ESX5 but that causes a purple screen of death on the HP Microserver as ESX boots.

2. HP Remote Access Card

On the Web-GUI for the card you can configure the SNMP community string. Whatever community string I configure it will not respond to SNMPWalk queries yet everything else is working ok. Am I missing anything - are you able to get SNMP responses from your Remote Access Card?