Re: Opinions on Raid

On 28-2-2007 0:42 Geoff Tolley wrote:
>> [2] How do people on this list monitor their hardware raid? Thus far we
>> have used Dell and the only way to easily monitor disk status is to use
>> their openmanage application. Do other controllers offer easier means
>> of monitoring individual disks in a raid configuration? It seems one
>> advantage software raid has is the ease of monitoring.

Recent Dell raid-controllers are based on LSI chips, although they are
not exactly the same as similar LSI-controllers (anymore). Our Dell
Perc5/e and 5/i work with the MegaCLI-tool from LSI. But that tool has
really limited documentation from LSI itself. Luckily Fujitsu-Siemens
offers a nice PDF:
http://manuals.fujitsu-siemens.com/serverbooks/content/manuals/english/mr-sas-sw-ug-en.pdf

Besides that, there are several Dell linux resources popping up,
including on their own site:
http://linux.dell.com/

> Personally I use nagios with nrpe for most of the monitoring, and write
> a little wrapper around the cli monitoring tool from the controller
> manufacturer to grok whether it's in a good/degraded/bad state.

If you have a MegaCLI-version, I'd like to see it, if possible? That
would definitely save us some reinventing the wheel :-)

> Dell PERC controllers I think are mostly just derivatives of Adaptec/LSI
> controllers, so you might be able to get a more convenient monitoring
> tool from one of them that might work. See if you can find your PERC
> version in http://pciids.sourceforge.net/pci.ids, or if you're using
> Linux then which hw raid module is loaded for it, to get an idea of
> which place to start looking for that.

The current ones are afaik all LSI-based. But at least the recent SAS
controllers (5/i and 5/e) are.

Best regards,

Arjen