Dell OpenManage for disk servers

As we've been telling everyone who'll listen, we at Oxford are big fans of the Dell 12-bay disk servers for grid storage (previously R510 units, now R720xd ones). A few people have now bought them and asked about monitoring them.

Dell's tools all go by the general 'OpenManage' branding, which covers a great range of things, including various general purpose GUI tools. However, for the disk servers, we generally go for a minimal command-line install.

Dell have the necessary bits available in a YUM-able repository as described on the Dell Linux wiki. Our setup simple involves:

• Installing the repository file,
• yum install srvadmin-storageservices srvadmin-omcommon,
• service dataeng start
• and finally logging out and back in again, or otherwise picking up the PATH variable change from the newly installed srvadmin-path.sh script in /etc/profile.d

At that point, you should be able to query the state of your array with the 'omreport' tool, for example:

# omreport storage vdisk controller=0
List of Virtual Disks on Controller PERC H710P Mini (Embedded)

Controller PERC H710P Mini (Embedded)
ID                            : 0
Status                        : Ok
Name                          : VDos
State                         : Ready
Hot Spare Policy violated     : Not Assigned
Encrypted                     : No
Layout                        : RAID-6
Size                          : 100.00 GB (107374182400 bytes)
Associated Fluid Cache State  : Not Applicable
Device Name                   : /dev/sda
Bus Protocol                  : SATA
Media                         : HDD
Read Policy                   : Adaptive Read Ahead
Write Policy                  : Write Back
Cache Policy                  : Not Applicable
Stripe Element Size           : 64 KB
Disk Cache Policy             : Enabled

We also have a rough and ready Nagios plugin which simply checks that each physical disk reports as 'OK' and 'Online' and complains if anything else is reported.