HP DL380 G5 w/ESX - Raid Question

[Saltshaker2112]

So I have another server I inherited which I know was setup with a RAID 5 and runs off of a P400 card. One of the discs died so I replaced it (hot swap). Now normally you can check the status through the HP config utility but since this is an ESX box, I have no way of doing this while the server is up which I had to do because some of the VMs are production servers. In the past, I have done the same thing on another DL but had a strait OS on it and once the drive was swapped, it rebuilt the drive after a series of lights started. First all flashed blue then changed back to green...something like that. Anyway, on this ESX box, the replaced drive just started blinking green in a steady pattern for a while. There was no flash of blue lights or anything I saw...when I checked it in the morning, the green light flashes like the rest with activity.

So my question is, Is there a specific light pattern during startup when the drive automatically rebuilds like the all blue flashing or is there is different depending on the setup of the server like this one which has ESX and is only managed through the BIOS?

I guess my concern is, I dont what to assume the drive is rebuilt automatically unless of course all RAID 5's in an HP will rebuild regardless of your OS...So is it possible that the replacement drive is just sitting there waiting to "put back" into the array through the BIOS utility?

I suppose I dont know for sure without shutting down all my VMs then rebooting the server into the BIOS utilty but of course I would have to wait to do that. So any insight here would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Chris.

[Johan Guldmyr]

On all smart array controllers the rebuild start automagically when you hot-swap a disk.

So it's still not possible to install ADU or ACU on ESX?

[Saltshaker2112]

Ok..thanks. Unfortunately it is ESXi 4.0 which I believe does not support running the ADU on the host. There are some posts about installing it but upgrading the host to ESX is not an option at the moment but will probably happen once we get another server to migate these VMs to. I'll have to check again to see if its possible to run that utility on ESXi.