Storage / Disk Health and Alerting

[russjar]

Hi all,

I've been looking into implementing disk monitoring and alerting at the host (ESX 3.5 & 4.0) and virtual center (VC2.5 & vSphere) level and the information out there is somewaht disjointed. I have a project to implement local disk monitoring via a managment staion. Now it's easy enough to configure the hosts and virtual center for SNMP trap forwarding which has been done. But I'm yet to see how to implement local hard drive health monitoring in the event a disk dies which is part of a RAID set.(this is a pretty important thing to monitor)

I've read in these forums that you need to install the hardware agents into the SC. Now from my understanding VMware didn't really support this configuration, or like you doing this unless this has changed. Ideally what I would like to see is the storage sub-system in the health status within virtual center but have been unable to find how this is done exactly.

So I really would like to get some feedback on how this is getting implemented by other people.

VCP,MCSE NT4/W2k/W2k3, MCSA W2k3

[RvdNieuwendijk]

Our ESX servers don't have local disks but use only SAN disks. The disks monitoring is done by the SAN. But we have installed the vendor's hardware agents into the SC of the ESX servers to monitor other things like CPU, memory and fans.

Regards, Robert

[russjar]

thanks for your feedback. Have you seen any performance impact with the hardware agenst installed in the SC?

Would relly like to here from others who have successfully implemented local disk monitoring.

VCP,MCSE NT4/W2k/W2k3, MCSA W2k3

[RvdNieuwendijk]

It is hard to say, because we did not measure the impact of the agents. But I think the performance impact of the hardware agents is low. Just for the record, we use HP blades with the HP agents.