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Justin
Asked: 2011-08-18 10:53:01 +0800 CST

How To Get Notified When Hard Drives Fail In Dell PowerEdge Servers

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I have a Dell PowerEdge R415 and R515 and wondering how I can be alerted remotely when a hard drive fails in either server? Both are running RAID, so I need to be notified, so I can swap out the drive. Both servers only have the basic Baseboard Management Controller. Is this possible with a third party tool/software?

dell-poweredge

4 Answers

  1. Dell OpenManage software will do this for you. I would imagine it shipped with your server, otherwise you can download it from the Dell website

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  2. If you have a DRAC card in the server that can send out alerts and it doesn't matter what OS is installed in the server. The cards are only a couple hundred bucks or so if you don't already have them and the give you a LOT of remote functionally like web based KVM, remote power up/down, etc.

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  3. The Dell OpenManage software can send out alerts to the console and broadcast messages to the network. I'd much prefer email since I monitor multiple clients so another option in the OpenManage software is to run an application. There is a simple emailer program called bmail that I use and I setup a batch file to run.

    So I setup a folder on the C: drive called bmail and copy the bmail.exe to this folder. Then created a batch file called email.cmd with the following code:

    REM Created by Jerod Hammerstein
REM This is called via the Dell System Administrator in case of storage alerts 
REM using bmail to send logs via email to the recipients listed in toaddress 
REM when calling email.cmd, use first parameter "%1" as subject
REM use second paramater as full path to log file then alter command line to include -m "%2".
REM Put SMTP server address here and make sure it allows Relay from 127.0.0.1
SET SMTP="192.168.1.200"
SET toaddress="[email protected],[email protected]"
SET fromaddress="[email protected]"
c:\bmail\bmail -s %SMTP% -t %toaddress% -f %fromaddress% -h -a %1

    In the OpenManage Server Administrator, go to Alert Management and click on the system event you want to be emailed for. Check "Excecute application" and in the "absolute path to the application" put the following:

    c:\bmail\email.cmd "Put the name of the System Event here"

    That's it.

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  4. I use Dell Openmanage Server Administrator Managed Node with Nagios and the check_openmanage plugin (http://folk.uio.no/trondham/software/check_openmanage.html). And then checking it all via SMTP.

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