Monitoring Local Array Hard Drive Status on VMware ESXi

I have had many network admins comment to me that one problem with VMware is that they cannot see the status of an array that is local or directly attached to the ESXi server.  This is certainly a problem.  We need to know immediately when a drive in an array fails so that it can be replaced and the parity rebuilt.  As admins, one of our primary objectives is to maintain data protection from hard drive failure at all times.  But a drive failure can leave you completely vulnerable (depending on RAID type used and hot spare configuration). 

Server vendors have long since had solid integration with Windows.  Well, the good news is that VMware has addressed this problem and the solution has been around since ESXi 4.x.  In ESXi VMware introduced a hypervisor with a much smaller foot print.  To support the hardware integration they developed a new api’s using the Common Information Model or CIM.  Hardware vendors are responsible for making the CIM providers which are known as Host Extensions and can be deployed using the Host Update Manager or the esxcli utility.  HP offers the Offline Bundle available on the downloads page for the appropriate server platform and OS.  You will need to check your server vendor documentation for where to download the update.

The hard drive status will then be available through the Hardware Status tab of the VSphere client.  You cannot configure the array from here but it will reveal whether the array is degraded and you will be able to determine which drive is failed.

Alerts can then be generated through VCenter.  There is a pre-configured alert at the VCenter level that can be enabled called “Host storage status”.  There are several actions that can be configured when the alarm triggers such as traps or emails to team members or other monitoring systems.  The drive failures can then be acted on immediately greatly reducing the "window of vulnerability".

Note: Standalone ESXi servers don’t support generating Alerts so this would be one good reason to purchase one of the very cost effective Essentials bundles offered by VMware.

Once the CIM provider is installed other third party management systems can also be used to pull that data from the host.  Veeam Monitor is one example.  Review your network management system documentation.