ML350 Server Not Beeping When RAID Disk Fails.

[JonathanAnon]

We use G6 and G8 ML350 servers for our client's servers. But we have found that they do not make a beeping sound by default when a disk fails.. Is this turned off by default or is there any way that I can turn it on... 

Unfortunately this has come to a head this week, when I arrived on a site to find BOTH disks in a RAID 1 had failed... 

[waaronb]

A lot of HP admins will use monitoring software to alert on errors. Whether it's HP SIM or the new AlertMail feature that comes with ILO 4, or some other OS based monitoring... as long as it can detect HP issues and send emails, that's a good way to do it.

HP publishes it's MIBs and I've used Solarwind in addition to SIM to track and graph things like system temps, hardware status, etc. MRTG, Nagios, etc would all work just as well since it's just SNMP polling.

Going waaaay back, Compaq used to offer emailing capabilities in the agents... it worked okay, and the system itself could send an email if an error came up that didn't crash the system.

The problem is, what happens if you do have an error where the server dies? You need remote monitoring to handle that scenario.

HP SIM is kind of a resource hog, but it really does a decent job of keeping track of your servers.

Since most of the time, servers are somewhere in a room by themselves, having them beep when something happens isn't always going to get the response you want. There are the health LEDs on the front to indicate any problems. If you're in hearing range, you're probably also able to walk by and look for any amber lights, if remote alerting is simply not an option.

[JonathanAnon]

Hi waaronb, 

took me quite a while to get SIM installed on my test server.. Issues with database (as there was already an existing SQL Express set up with ArcServe), and then other issues with patches and the like... But I got it installed eventually. I'm not sure this is gonna be an appropriate solution for me. Most of the sites we deal with are small businesses (less than 30 people) who have one server. Whie SIM looks great if you have loads of servers, it seems like overkill for just a one server site. 

The most preferable solution for me would be to have both 1) audible beep and 2) email sent to myself ... when there are problems with the RAID. I will have a look at the iLo solution, but I'm not sure that the clients would be interested in buying a license for this. 

I've seen somebody mention that it may be possible to get the Smart Array Controller to email you, so I'm gonna look into that now. 

regards, 

J