Detecting RAID status of Proliant servers

[Jeff Ligon]

I am trying to create an application to help manage the 2000+ systems in the environment I work in. I am looking for a way to detect the state of the drives for the OS partition. In other words, I need to know if the OS partition is on a Mirror set or RAID 5 set on a SMART controller. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have looked at using the SNMP mibs from the Insight agents but have not been able to glean much out of them. I already have an existing application that pulls ILO and some mib information through snmp.

[Sung Oh]

Hi Jeff.

I suggest that you have RAID 1 for OS partition and you can use RAID 5 for data parititon.

Let say you have 7 300GB drives and you can install two raid card controllers. two 300GB drives to be RAID 1 and map as C: total size of 300GB drives. rest of 5 drives can be RAID 5 and map as D: total size of 1.2TB drives.

I hope this helps,

Sung

[Jeff Ligon]

Thanks Sung but the question isn't what suggestions do you have for the RAID to use, but rather for how to automatically or remotely detect the type of RAID that was used. This would be for reporting purposes.

Thanks, Jeff

[Brian_Murdoch]

Hi Jeff,

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but the ACU Command Line Interface (CLI) can give you this information on Windows based systems and many others. The syntax is a bit awkward but you will get used to it. You can run commands from outwith the cli program by providing the paramaters required, say in a batch file.

For example to display all the smart array controllers on a system you would use:-

hpacucli controller all show

This might display the follwing:-

Smart Array 5i in Slot 0 (sn: XXYYZZ)

To display the logical drives on this controller you would use:-

hpacucli controller slot=0 logicaldrive all show

This might display the following:-

Smart Array 5i in Slot 0

array A
logicaldrive 1 (16.9 GB, 1+0, OK)

array B
logicaldrive 2 (135 GB, 5, OK)

Here Array A (The first array created on the first controller) would be the system disk. You can see here that Array A is Raid 1+0. Array B which is a data disk in my case is raid 5.

I'm not a programmer but I don't think it would take too much effort to output the results of these commands to a text file from within the batch file using redirect.

Here is a link to the ACUCLI for Windows.
There are other versions available for Netware /Linux etc.

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/23026.html

Here is a link to the ACU User Guide which includes a section on the ACU CLI and it's use/syntax etc.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00294139/c00294139.pdf

There may be much better solutions which others can suggest but this can give you what you want with a little effort.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[Wolfram Eckert]

Hi Jeff,

CLI is a good Idea, i think!

Other suggestions:
A)
Is your "existing application" your reporting-tool and you have to use that?
I'm asking, because Systems Insight Manager is a excellent tool to collect Informations like that, and to create, export, etc. Reports. It is on the Management-CD delivered with your ProLiants for free.
There is also a download at: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/download.html
B)
You can have a look at the Systems Management Homepage of your ProLiant via
https://name_or_IP_of_your_server:2381

Hope that helps and sorry, if its nothing new!

Wolfram

[Jeff Ligon]

Actually we have the Systems Management Center running but I have been unable to this point to get a correlation between logical partitions and physical drives. I will look at it again.

As far as the HPACUCLI, I am limited in that I have to be able to do this remotely over the network. It appears that it does not provide a way to do this remotely.