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Looking for way to collect HBA information with SIM or other means

 
NJK-Work
Honored Contributor

Looking for way to collect HBA information with SIM or other means

I am looking for a way to collect information about servers regarding if they have an HBA installed in the them.

In SIM, I see a report for this. However, my SIM server only reports one servers having an HBA. In reality, there must be at least 100 servers - yet SIM only reports one server.

Does any one know what might be special about that server that allows SIM to "see" the HBAs in it? There is nothing special about the agents installed - they are version 8.20. I have other servers with HBAs running older and newer versions yet none of them show up in the SIM report.

I check the SMH on various servers, and I can see the "external storage" view on them and see the HBA information - yet I do not know how to extract that information like SMH is doing. Is is a WMI query?

So I guess my questions are:
1) What makes it possible for SIM to report HBA information for a server? I have HP agents on ALL my servers, yet only one is reported in SIM.
2) Is is possible to write a WMI qeury to extract the same information SMH is using? Or does SMH use some propreitery API calls to get this information and that is not accessible to us?

Thanks
Nelson
2 REPLIES 2
NJK-Work
Honored Contributor

Re: Looking for way to collect HBA information with SIM or other means

Looks like the "HP WMI Storage Providers" service might be what SIM is using. I am guessing the WBEM Providers installs this.

Yet, those servers without that service still report HBA information in the SMH - so if anyone knows how to extract that data using a script, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

Nelson
NJK-Work
Honored Contributor

Re: Looking for way to collect HBA information with SIM or other means

This appears to work on newer Qlogic and Emulex HBA models:

1) Download and install FCInfo (from Microsoft) on a Windows 2000 or 2003 server. Does not install on Windows 2008.

2) Grab the fcinfo.exe, hbaapi.dll, and hbatapi.dll files (c:\windows\system32) from the server and copy them out to all servers in your company to some directory - for example c:\scripts.

3) Use SysInternals psexec.exe to remotely call the fcinfo.exe on your servers and output the results to a text for later processing:

psexec.exe \\servername c:\scripts\fcinfo.exe >outputfile.txt

Alternatively you could install FCInfo on each server and then use a VBscript to query each of the servers remotely and avoid having to use psexec.exe. However, since FCInfo does not install on Windows 2008 your options are pretty limited. You can copy the files out Windows 2008, but since you cannot install it, you get no WMI and hence no remote VBscript support. But fcinfo.exe can be run manually on a Windows 2008 machine and appears to work.

Note - I found a few older HBA models that do not support FCInfo - so currently I have no solution for those.

Nelson