Mag Gam wrote:> At my university we use HP hardware exclusively. When we build CentOS
> our Unix SA is running several HP utilities. I am wondering what some
> of these utilities are, such as cmaidad. Is it possible to to use
> these HP utilities to monitor for disk crashes (similar to smartd)? Is
> anyone using native HP utilities for this purpose?
The only HP tool I found useful was hpacucli, which is an
SmartArray management tool, I think for only the Smart controllers,
(e.g. not the cheap shit SATA controllers). You could detect
drive failures and predictive failures etc. Though for some
stupid reason at least as of the last time I used the tool
you could not force a drive off line or force a drive to fail. I
recall 2 problems in particular where the drive was failing and
causing lots of I/O problems on the system but we had to send
someone out on site to remove the disk, the controller wouldn't
mark it as completely bad(it said it was about to fail). HP
support claimed perhaps an updated firmware would of fixed that
particular behavior (DL360 G4p class system with a SmartArray
6404 PCI-X RAID controller).
The bonus with hpacucli is you don't need any special drivers to
get it to work, it uses the same drivers that the controller does.
I'm really not fond of installing vendor specific drivers on top
of my systems for monitoring purposes, maybe I'm paranoid but I
don't have a lot of faith in them.
Unlike the Dell raid management tool which needs a bunch of RPMs
installed and drivers etc(at least from what I've seen, and I've
had it crash at least one model of dell system very reliably within
seconds of running it).
iLO 2 can give quite a bit of hardware info as well, tons more
than iLO 1 could, though it is web based. You may be able to
access the iLO 2 event logs through OpenIPMI.
You could install the support tools for HP Systems Insight
manager, though as mentioned above it has a lot of drivers
and packages to support. I installed the agents recently on
a VMWare ESX system just to see what it could do(since the
agent was specifically for ESX), but at least under
ESX the DL580G1 I was testing it on really didn't give anything
useful.
nate