How to tell if BBWC is installed and working

[Cruicer]

I've acquired a new ESX environment with a job change, trying to wrap my head around what was done in the past so have a question re: BBWC...

vCenter 5.0

Host consists of one 3.5, most are 4.1 and some 5.0

100% Local Storage, no SAN as of yet.

Trying to determine if my hosts have BBWC installed.  Short of cracking the case which I can't do since all my hosts are at a remote location.

When I look at the "Hardware Status" some list "Battery" while some don't.

If BBWC IS INSTALLED...is there any way or reason why it wouldn't show up in the Hardware tab?

Is there a command within ESX4.1 / 5.0 that I can run that will tell me if BBWC is connected?

I was once told that "Without write-cache you might see ~5-10MB/s compared to ~80-100 MB/s with BBWC/FBWC", however what Performance counter should I be looking at.  Again, this is ALL local storage.

Datastore? - don't think this since all I see there are latency rates

Disk? - And if disk, what object? the <servername>? and then what measurement, guessing Write Rate?

If there is an easier way to find out, I am all ears...

[zXi_Gamer]

I believe esxcli storage nmp device list would list about the bbwc in 5.0. In 4.0 or 4.x, installing the management agents should display about the drive controllers in health summary.

http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03245917/c03245917.pdf might also be useful

[vGuy]

If you are using hp servers you could use hpacucli, run the below command:

ctrl all show config detail

The battery pack count should be 1, if 0 then there is no BBWC.

For versions prior 5.0, there is no ESX specific hpacucli package and the linux one needs to be used. You may do a quick google search for it and hopefully good info on it.