Assessing ESXi 4.1 server health?

[drnewman5]

How to assess the health of physical hardware, especially hard drives, of an ESXi 4.1 host?

After an unscheduled power outage, VMs on one of our ESXi 4.1 hosts sporadically disappear and reappear. The vSphere client reports the VMs and the the host are inaccessible, but then they sometimes reappear as accessible.

I suspect the power outage and resulting hard power off may have corrupted data on this host's disks (even thought the VMs use shared storage).

I can use external tools by booting a live CD, but if there's a way from vSphere to do this I'd appreciate learning about it. In a similar vein if there's a way to monitor host health on an ongoing basis that'd be great too.

Thanks!

[vmroyale]

Hello.

What kind of system are you working with?

Good Luck!

[drnewman5]

Hi Brian,

This is a generic Supermicro X7DBU 1U server.

2 x Intel E5405 (8 cores total, each @ 2 GHz)

16 Gbytes RAM

4 physical disks (sorry, I don't know size; again, VMs use shared storage)

In the vSphere client, this host's local storage shows 693.25 Gbytes of capacity, formatted as VMFS 3.46 using 8-Mbyte blocks.

Thanks again for clues as to troubleshooting disk health on this system.