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mjallday
Asked: 2009-06-23 23:38:22 +0800 CST

Dell OpenManage - Finding Information

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I have a bunch of Dell servers with OpenManage installed.

If I access the RAID manager screens when it goes through the BIOS check, I can view each individual disk and see any issues. Specifically I can see the number of sectors on the disk marked as damaged.

I cannot seem to find this information within the OpenManage screens that you access once the server is up and running (the website on the server).

Does anyone know how I can access this information without bringing the server down and rebooting it? It seems like it should be trivial!

dell dell-poweredge dell-openmanage

4 Answers

  1. First, make sure you can see the PERC controller and disks under the "Storage" part of the menu on the left side of the screen. If you can't see the controller and drives, then your PERC firmware probably needs to be updated.

    Once you have determined that your server storage is visible to OpenManage/ServerAdministrator, you can click on "Storage" (or "System") on the left side of the screen and you should have a "Diagnostics" tab that appears towards the top. From here you can run diagnostic tests on all hardware components in the server including your PERC controller and array disks without rebooting the server.

    I have never done this until right now and just finished a test on my 2850. I am using Dell OpenManage Server Administrator v4.4.0 and my PERC 4e/Di is at firmware version 521S.

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  2. Start the Server Administrator and in the left pane click on "Storage".

    Note that this will only show anything if you ticked the Storage Management option when you installed the OpenManage stuff. Your tag implies you have a 2850, presumably with a Perc4e, so you should be able to see your controller config there. With SAS5/iR controllers older versions of Openmanage don't support this controller and don't show anything.

    Assuming your Openmanage shows the RAID controller navigate to the virtual disks and click on the virtual disk name to see all the drives that are in the array.

    If you don't see anything under the Storage heading just download and install the latest version of OpenManage and make sure Storage Management is included as an installation option. NB uninstalling the old version of OpenManage will probably need a reboot.

    JR

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  3. Instead of OpenManage you might want to try Dell's OpenManage Array Manager. This provides better access to the RAID controllers.

    It may have become unsupported in the last few years, but it might do the trick.

    Also, this information should just be SMART ... in theory, any SMART monitoring tool should show you this info (regardless of the array). Try smartmontools if you're running linux. And wikipedia has a listing of SMART monitoring applications.

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  4. You will not see bad block numbers anywhere. What you will see is media error counts, which amounts up to a predictive failure error.

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