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TheBoy99
Contributor
Contributor

Proliant ML110 G5 and SMART Array E200 reporting status at last

I think I have at last managed to get reports of the status of the SMART Array on an ML110 G5, and no PSOD yet (been up an hour).

I'll post some details when I get time, and when I know its stable, but just wanted people to with this (unsupported) setup who have not been able to monitor their drive status that there may be some hope :smileygrin:

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Nice work - I'm interested in this.

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TheBoy99
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, I suspect a lot of people are - seems a fair few of us have these ML110 G5's for playing, complete with E200 Array Controllers, and seem to get little help from the vendors (VMWare or HP).

I have a procedure now I think, but before I'm responsible for breaking everyone's ESXi servers, just want to check mine is stable over the weekend (I have a few live production VMs that are very busy, so if it makes it through the weekend, all should be good). I'm also going to try a P400 controller in a while as well, just to check that can report using this method.

BTW, fixed and error with my original implementation that killed off a load of sensor reports

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TheBoy99
Contributor
Contributor

Worked fine with a P400 controller in the ML110 G5 as well, and has run stable since Friday (though admittedly a couple of planned shutdowns to swap controllers).

Sadly, didn't help with my ongoing disk problem, but thats a HP SMART Array issue, not a ESXi or monitoring issue (rebuilding the mirror stops after about 4hrs, and goes back to status of Ready for Recovery).

I'll post up a guide when I get time to type it out in such a way that most ESXi admins would understand. If anyone has advanced ESXi knowledge and wants to be a Guinea Pig, reply here, and I'll send rough instructions.

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I'd be interested in that and happy to help if I can.

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TheBoy99
Contributor
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J1mbo - I've sent you a PM. It would be good to know it works on a another ML110 G5 in a test environment, and that all required steps are in the instructions.

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TheBoy99
Contributor
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J1mbo, did you try the procedure, and if so, how did you get on?

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TheBoy99
Contributor
Contributor

For anyone else interested in how to do this, I have posted the instructions on one of my forums here

I posted it on my forum, to save having to maintain the same instructions in multiple places.

The procedure works fine for E200 and P400 in a Proliant ML110 G5, suspect it would work fine for similar servers beyond ML110

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fixitchris
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thank you genius boy!

Any issues running a mirror with 3GB SATA drives on the E200? I read the hdd cache is disabled by the E200...

Chris

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You need the battery option for the E200 to enable the cache.

TheBoy - Still not got on to this, sorry!

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TheBoy99
Contributor
Contributor

v1.72 firmware on the E200 does allow you to re-enable the write cache on the physical drives. If you are running an ML110 G5, don't put a firmware later than v1.72 on the E200 (or v4.12 if running a P400), else the ML110 can no longer see it.

Obviously, you run a dataloss risk unless you run UPS etc.

The write cache on the actual raid card is disabled unless it has the BBWC option as suggested by J1mbo.

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cookieme
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think I have at last managed to get reports of the status of the SMART Array on an ML110 G5, and no PSOD yet (been up an hour).

I'll post some details when I get time, and when I know its stable, but just wanted people to with this (unsupported) setup who have not been able to monitor their drive status that there may be some hope :smileygrin:

Hi TheBoy99!

Did you start with the vanilla VMware ESXi 4 generic install and then install the HP ESXi bundle or did you install HP ESXi 4 and then apply the bundle?

The reason why I'm asking is that the HP ESXi 4 has the CIM providers already installed, so couldn't you have just installed that and then made the modification that you explain on your blog?

Thanks

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KiwiSi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi there,

I'm running the latest firmware (ie: v1.84) on my e200 controller and it runs ok in my ML110 G5 running ESXi 4.0. My attached disks are presented ok and can have vmfs data stores created on them.

The only catch is that to update it from v1.72 of the firmware to v1.84 you need to perform this via the Windows or Linux based Online Flash upgrade which is a real hassle.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Simon






Simon Seagrave

TechHead

VMware vExpert 2009

http://www.techhead.co.uk

http://twitter.com/kiwi_si

Simon Seagrave TechHead VMware vExpert 2009,2010,2011,2012 http://techhead.co http://twitter.com/kiwi_si
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gopher49
Contributor
Contributor

I installed an E200 controller in a Dell Precision 670 and was able to create a mirror and have it seen by ESXi v4, however, my throughput is beyond slow... I'm only getting 3 MB/s. Any suggestions? I have the current firmware installed.

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Do you have the battery module?

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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gopher49
Contributor
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I do not have a battery pack. I thought about getting the battery pack and cache upgrade. I plan to order those sometime this week... You would think I would get better performance than this though....

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f10
Expert
Expert

Yes, the battery backed write cache is extremely import, you would see a drastic improvement in the Read/Write with this cache and also when there is a power failure the data which were not written to the disk would be saved in the cache and written when power is restored.

If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".

f10

VCP3,VCP4,HP UX CSA

Regards, Arun Pandey VCP 3,4,5 | VCAP-DCA | NCDA | HPUX-CSA | http://highoncloud.blogspot.in/ If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".
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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

3MB/s is fairly typical for a platform with no hardware cache and write caching disabled on the disks too.

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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gopher49
Contributor
Contributor

Really? That seems so slow... I was beginning to think something else was going on. I'll purchase the cache upgrade and see what happens. I'll update the ticket once I receive the upgrade and test the performance.

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notsteve82
Contributor
Contributor

I also had drive speed of 3 MB/s with the Smartarray E200i on my HP Proliant ML110 G5 server. It wasnt until after the firmware upgrade AND

using the Smart Array Configuration Utility CD from HP that I was able to locate and enable SATA disk caching for the array. The speed increase has been tremendous, averaging around 50 MB/s.

One of my ML110G5 with E200 controller is showing my 4TB RAID-10 Array as 512 BYTES and as a result wont let me format and set it up as persistant storage. Any ideas whats going on here?

Steve

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