4

We're hoping to solve a need for a low-cost SAN at one of our sites by deploying an OpenFiler on a DL360 strapped to an MSA70.

We've been running a similar setup for 18 months at our locel site, so we're happy with the performance and compatability. The problem is that this new unit with be a remote data-center which we rarely visit, so we need to know if a disk has failed in the unit via some kind of notifications.

I'm assuming I have to get the HP agents operational within the OS in order to get SNMP notifications of a disk failure and tie the server to our SIM server. OpenFiler's built on rPath Linux and while there are HP Linux agents for the DL360, I don't know what kind of package I'd have to use for rPath.

I looked at having the iLo forward alerts, but that appears to require the agents on the OS, just the same.

Can anyone recommend a way to fix this issue? I can't deploy the unit without knowing that we'll receive disk failure notifications. Would FreeNAS be a suitable option?

ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
Chris Thorpe
  • 9,903
  • 22
  • 32

1 Answers1

3

One option with rPath and other distributions that do not readily support RPMs or have official support from HP (e.g. Gentoo) is to use the simple cciss_vol_status utility available at: http://freshmeat.net/projects/ccissvolstatus

The man page is available online.

It's a lightweight C program and can be compiled or packaged in the rPath Conary format. The usage and output looks like:

cerberus ~ # cciss_vol_status -q /dev/cciss/c0d0 
/dev/cciss/c0d0: (Smart Array P410i) RAID 5 Volume 0 status: OK.

But you can also see enclosure errors like:

/dev/cciss/c0d0: (Smart Array P800) Enclosure MSA60 (S/N: USP6712B39) on Bus 2, Physical Port 1E status: Power Supply Unit failed

Since this installs without HP agents, it can be incorporated in a script. You can pull just about every OTHER health attribute from the ILO, so this completes the coverage for a remote server.

ewwhite
  • 194,921
  • 91
  • 434
  • 799
  • Legend. I ditched OpenFiler about 6 months back because of the limitations of IET in a vSphere environment, but this is still great info. Thank you! – Chris Thorpe Aug 16 '11 at 11:59