Still no ADAPTEC RAID Management in ESXi5?

[gregsn]

To my disappointment, there is still seems to be no Adaptec management tools within ESXi,  Does anyone have a way to monitor Adaptect 5805/6806 RAID arrays in ESXi5?  Adaptec released CIM support/tools for ESXi4 for the 5805 controller but nothing yet for the 6805 and nothing at all for ESXi5 from what I can tell.

If there is no way to monitor these controllers in ESXi5, should I just toss them and get some LSI controllers??? :smileyplain:

[mrudloff]

Aww man we talked a lot about that with Adaptec and the problem is that a. Adaptec has to create the modules but b. it requires VMware's involvement ...

Now idea why it doesn't go forward .. We are using LSI now mainly for our ESX deployments (where local storage is required that is, booting still from USB), but the interface is just horrible (create a Raid10 and you know what I am talking about).

Please even though the status shows up in vSphere - you still cannot interact with it as it is read only so you still need to reboot if you need to make a change (or to find out which disk is failed if the backplane doesn't show it etc.)

So yea - as much as I like the small foot print of ESXi, it clearly has disadvantages .. Having said that - the CIMs from Adaptec working ok, just a pain to use only the remote arcconf - plus it is still limited and you can't configure email notifications etc. (you can't do that with the LSI either so you'd rely on vcenter alerts).

[gregsn]

Michael R. wrote:

"... the CIMs from Adaptec working ok, just a pain to use only the remote arcconf..."

Are you able to get the CIM providers to work in ESXi5?  Back in the ESXi4 days, I could get them to work with the 5805 controller, but not the 6805 controller.  Have you been able to get them to work in ESXi5?  Working CIM providers would still be better than absolutely nothing. In this day in age, not being able to even monitor a RAID is getting a little bit ridiculous.

I have heard of setting up SNMP traps to monitor hardware.  Has anyone actually done this with success with the Adaptec controllers?

[mrudloff]

gregsn wrote:

Michael R. wrote:

"... the CIMs from Adaptec working ok, just a pain to use only the remote arcconf..."

Are you able to get the CIM providers to work in ESXi5?  Back in the ESXi4 days, I could get them to work with the 5805 controller, but not the 6805 controller.  Have you been able to get them to work in ESXi5?  Working CIM providers would still be better than absolutely nothing. In this day in age, not being able to even monitor a RAID is getting a little bit ridiculous.

I have heard of setting up SNMP traps to monitor hardware.  Has anyone actually done this with success with the Adaptec controllers?

I don't have 6 series cards and I haven't tried the current CIMs on vSphere 5 as the website states 4.1 so I am not trying it to be honest as it is likely to fail (was the same when 4.x was released and driver / agent were available for 3.x only and caused a pink screen when attempted to install on 4.x).

But I agree - it is rubbish for standalone hosts as you simply have no way of knowing if a disk fails or not .. I was in the datacenter one day and found an ESX server with two failed disks in a Raid 10 so it was simply luck that the box was still alive ...

[RParker]

No OEM SMTP management either?  I would think this type of monitoring begins with the hardware, not the OS...

[gregsn]

RParker wrote:

No OEM SMTP management either?  I would think this type of monitoring begins with the hardware, not the OS...

Considering this is a directly attached storage RAID controller, I'm not sure how I would get any sort of reporting directly from the controller itself without some sort of driver, agent or management software running on the OS.  Therefore, I am not clear on what you mean by OEM SMTP management.  Could you please provide an example of the RAID controller you are describing?

[mrudloff]

No idea whether they are on the HCL - but your best bet really are Arecas ... Areca controller have a built-in webinterface / dedicated NIC for the management ....

[gregsn]

Thank you for the info.  I will have to try out the Arecas controller next time I purchase a RAID controller.  My only immediate complaint about them is the use of active cooling (one more thing to fail), but otherwise they seem like a good solution in the future.

I just got off the phone with Adaptec and they told me that they will be providing CIMs for the 2000, 5000 and 6000 series controllers in this quarter.  This should provide adequate information for my purposes.