Hard Drive Status in HP Prolaint DL380 G5 from ILO 2 Port?

[Saltshaker2112]

I am in the process of updating this older box with ESX 5.1 . I first updated all the firmware from the downloadable firmware update DVD 10.10, connected to the ILO port and it does not show any hard drive status for the RAID. The ILO firmware is 2.09 and the Raid card is a P400 with firmware 7.22 on it. I thought you should be able to see the health of your Raid or drive status when connecting to the ILO port but there is no tab for it all, just power,memory,etc. Is this not the case or I am missing something here? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Chris.

[Oscar A. Perez]

ProLiant G5 servers do not support drive status from iLO2. A special SAS/SATA backplane and connector on the system board are required that are only available in the ML/DL G6 servers.

Here is the list of server that support Hard Drive status from iLO2:

ProLiant DL385 G6 server
ProLiant DL380 G6 server
ProLiant DL360 G6 server
ProLiant DL320 G6 server
ProLiant ML370 G6 server
ProLiant ML350 G6 server
ProLiant ML330 G6 server
ProLiant BL460c G6 server blade (this is the only blade that supports it)

[Saltshaker2112]

Thats what I was afraid of. I appreciate the reply/info....was hoping there was a way to check drive health status on this ESX box without having to reboot into the ACU utlilty.

[Matti_Kurkela]

I'm not primarily a VMware admin, but I've understood that installing the ESXi Offline Bundle would allow you to get the RAID health and other hardware health information using VMware's built-in CIM management infrastructure.

Also, the ESXi Utilities Offline Bundle includes hpacucli, a command-line tool which can be used to check SmartArray RAID status.

Although they are called "offline bundles", their description indicates they have functions that are useful on-line.

[Jan Soska]

Hello, Matti is exactly right - you can see any hw problem in HW status of each ESX/i server after instaling proper tools from HW vendor.

Jan

[Saltshaker2112]

I installed HP's custom ESX 5.1 iso on the DL380 G5 , Just in the config tab for health status of vsphere, I can see the drives and for fun, since this is not in production, pulled a drive and put it back. Sure enough it showed the reinserted drive rebuilding. But the links above for the offline bundle state there are for the G6 series. Doe that matter or isnt that already including in the HP custom iso?

[Matti_Kurkela]

I think the HP hardware monitoring tools are already included in the HP custom VMware ISOs. But it certainly won't hurt to check once in a while to see if a newer version with some useful new functionality or important bugfixes has been released.

But the title on the pages I linked mentions DL380 G6 specifically only because I used HP's "download drivers and utilities" search page to find drivers for DL380 G6 specifically (it was included in original poster's list and is one of the HP models I know quite well). Note that the Enhancements section says this release of the bundle includes G8 support, so it is definitely not exclusively for G6 servers.

If you go to http://www.hp.com/go/support and search for downloadables for your hardware model, then select VMware ESXi 5.x  as your OS, it will offer you the same packages for download if they are compatible. It is my experience that Proliant hardware monitoring tool & driver packages usually cover a range of server generations, and it seems VMware "offline bundles" are no exception to that.

[Saltshaker2112]

Thanks. I appreciate the info. I did check out the page for the G5 and there are links to the offline bundle but since I am at least able to see the status in the clinet or at least a better view than before, that I have to assume those bundles are included in the custom iso. But you are correct, checking for the latest updates would be wise from time time. Thanks again for everyones feedback.