Hardware Raid Question

athomas · 04-05-2010, 01:50 PM

I'm familiar with the method of viewing the integrity of a software Raid in Unix, but is there a way to monitor the health of a hardware raid from the command line? Viewing a list of the volumes, their sizes and the raid level would be great too.

Open to third party applications as well.

mostlyharmless · 04-05-2010, 02:44 PM

Usually the hardware will come with some sort of monitoring software for that, but all too often it is a closed source binary for a specific OS. If you have a particular piece of hardware in mind, you might want to see if there's an open source software utility for it, if you haven't bought it yet, then this is a great time to strike a blow for freedom and try to find a manufacturer that supports open source. You did mean hardware RAID, right? (as opposed to firmware/fakeraid/motherboard variety)

athomas · 04-05-2010, 03:57 PM

Yeah, I figured as much. Dell OpenManage seems to be the only option since it's a Perc controller. I was looking for something with less to it though, so it's not as confusing for the end user.

jefro · 04-05-2010, 08:19 PM

Start at the Dell site. They also offer linux options and support. The perc is a hardware and I am pretty sure most of what you want to know is available from the command line. Not sure that there is a gui but might be. Some distro's offer a pretty good system information but depends on distro and release.

When you boot the system is how I have always accessed the controller bios. It is kind of scary at first.

athomas · 04-05-2010, 09:00 PM

mostlyharmless is right in saying that the raid is locked down for the most part. I was just curious. Again, I need an in-OS snapshot of the Raid info.

alli_yas · 04-09-2010, 08:58 AM

Your best bet would be Dell themselves.

I have HP controllers on my servers; and HP has a util called hpacucli that allows one to view RAID status from the OS (ie post boot).