RAID on ESX3.5

[vmmax2479]

How do I find out how many drives, their sizes and which RAID I have on ESX 3.5 without rebooting it?

[Lightbulb]

If you have an HP system you can use hpacucli, I assume there are similar utilities for the other Major server Vendors.

If you have a whit box you may have to restart and check your RAID controllers interface.

[mcowger]

Entirely depends on your server. Depending on the RAID hardware installed and the support level from the vendor of that hardware, it may not be possible.

--Matt

[vmmax2479]

HP DL380 G5

i know I can do it by rebooting it but would like to avoid it

[Lightbulb · Accepted solution]

You can install the hpacucli for Red Hat 3

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15...

Check out (http://people.freebsd.org/~jcagle/hpacucli-readme) for exhaustive list of commands, I have a cheat sheet at work.

[Lightbulb]

No reboot needed for install or use

Here is a link with s shorter list of usefull commands

http://cainmanor.com/tech/proliant-support-pack-cli-on-linux

[vmmax2479]

this command shows me the status and details about RAID and controller. hpacucli ctrl all show status

can't seem to find the command to show me the number of disks and their sizes

[Lightbulb]

hpacucli slot=X pd all show Where X is the slot your Controler is in, should have been in the output of hpacucli ctrl all show

[vmmax2479]

what is the best practice on which RAID to create on ESX3.5, 0+1 or 5 or other?

[Lightbulb]

Well for high performance raid 10 is best, but if the ESX host's local storage is just for the SC you can use a RAID 1 miror or RAID 5.

For VMFS datastores for low impact VMs you can use RAID 5. For high I/O VMs i.e. SQL systems, you probably should use a VMFS datastore backed by RAID 10.

You will of course need shared storage for vmotion and HA/DRS

[vmmax2479]

Thank you all.

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