topic Re: collecting information about the HDD media in Operating System - VMware

collecting information about the HDD media

Bogdan Scintee — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:20:47 GMT

Hello all,

I'm using a server model number 504633-001 (Proliant DL360 G6 XENON X5550 QC 2.66 GHz, 2P, 12GB; PERFORMANCE SERVER KIT) with 8 HDD's model number 507127-B21 (300 GB SFF SAS Drives 10K spin (6G)).
On this system I'm having installed VMware ESX 4.0. I've tried to collect some data (most important information being the HDD serial number) by means of sdparm application. I've used an already compiled binary and a binary compiled by myself on this machine.
No matter the version number the results were:
> sdparm -vvvv /dev/sdb5
> open /dev/sdb5 with flags=0x800
inquiry cdb: 12 00 00 00 24 00
duration=0 ms
inquiry: requested 36 bytes but got 0 bytes
inquiry: got too few bytes (0)
SCSI INQUIRY command failed on /dev/sdb5

It looks like the SCSI controller is not supporting that inquiry. Any idea why is that? What are the alternatives?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Re: collecting information about the HDD media

Uwe Zessin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:32:45 GMT

Most likely the server does not have a single SCSI adapter. It has a complex SmartArray RAID controller which binds together multiple physical disks and creates one or more logical disks that are presented to the server.

If you want information about the physical disks it is best if you use HP's diagnostic utilities like SmartStart or Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU).

Re: collecting information about the HDD media

Michal Kapalka (mikap) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:18:19 GMT

hi,

you oculd also use ILO to check the HW configuration.

mikap

Re: collecting information about the HDD media

marcelo berges — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:49:45 GMT

these controllers are handeled by the cciss driver on regular linux kernels ,you may want to check on its documentation
http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/cciss.txt

The device naming scheme is:
68 /dev/cciss/c0d0 Controller 0, disk 0, whole device
69 /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 Controller 0, disk 0, partition 1
70 /dev/cciss/c0d0p2 Controller 0, disk 0, partition 2
71 /dev/cciss/c0d0p3 Controller 0, disk 0, partition 3
72
73 /dev/cciss/c1d1 Controller 1, disk 1, whole device
74 /dev/cciss/c1d1p1 Controller 1, disk 1, partition 1
75 /dev/cciss/c1d1p2 Controller 1, disk 1, partition 2
76 /dev/cciss/c1d1p3 Controller 1, disk 1, partition 3

dont feel 100% sure that esx uses the same estructure but I am sure this will get you on the correct direction

Re: collecting information about the HDD media

Uwe Zessin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:32:25 GMT

For more recent SmartArray controllers there is a new driver and the logical disks are named /dev/sdX.
But if you are looking for the 'serial number' zhat is used for warranty tracking - I don't think that is stored *in* the drive memory.

Re: collecting information about the HDD media

Bogdan Scintee — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:14:11 GMT

Thank you all for the very useful information.