Setting up a server with one of these RAID Controllers and trying to figure out if there is a management utility. This RoarkH guy has excellent instructions. Too bad VMWare communities don’t leave a way for me to thank him with a follow-up question:
Is there a web-based (or vSphere-based) utility that can somehow connect to this CLI?
This looks promising: VMware ESXi 5.0 Installation and RWC2 Tips and Tricks This document introduces the details of how to install VMware ESXi 5.0 Operating System onto an Intel® RAID controller and how to use Intel® RAID Web Console 2 on a client machine to manage the RAID controller remotely. (March, 2012)
I’ve tried following the instructions, but they reference a vib from intel that doesn’t exist; they must mean to get the vib from LSI? After all this, I can see the raid through vSphere but the RWC2 never finds the server.
I’m going to copy RoarkH’s instructions here, just in case:
1. Jan 25, 2012 4:31 PM in response to: RoarkH
Re: How To Monitor Drive Health on an Intel RS2BL040 RAID Controller
I have solved this myself, I'm posting what I did in case it helps someone else.
The RS2BL040 is actually a rebranded LSI card, these instructions will probably work for most LSI RAID cards, Intel RAID cards and at least some Dell cards including apparently the Perc 5i.
First you need the LSI MegaCLI Utility for vmware, it can be found at this link...
http://www.lsi.com/Search/Pages/downloads.aspx?k=megacli&r=os%3D%22AQZWTVdhcmUCb3MBAV4BJA%3D%3D%22
I downloaded the newest one, "VMware - 4.6 - CV" which includes version 8.00.46 of the MegaCli software. There are two files in the zip archive, a text file with some instructions and the MegaCli file which I uploaded to a folder on my datastore, I then used ssh to log into the ESXi host and changed to the directory I uploaded the file to. The file will need to be made executable ("chmod 755 MegaCli").
The command to check the status of the card is as follows...
./MegaCli -AdpAllInfo -aALL
Unfortunately, this failed complaining about a missing library, libstorelib.so.
Some more searching brought me to this page...
http://vmsysadmin.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/using-perc-5i-with-esxi-5-2/
In that page there is a link to a place you can download the missing file from which I am including here for convenience...
I uploaded that file into the same folder containing MegaCli and ran the above command again, everything works as expected, the command spits out a bunch of information about the card. Look for the section labeled "Device Present" to see if there have been any drive failures and the Error Counters section for reported errors.
Thanks RoarkH!