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Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Storage Management User's Guide
Storage Properties and Current Activity
Monitoring Disk Reliability on RAID Controllers
Using Alarms to Detect Failures
Using Enclosure Temperature Probes
Rescan to Update Storage Configuration Changes
Time Delay in Displaying Configuration Changes
I/O and Reboot Requirements for Detecting Physical Disk Status Changes
This section describes various methods to determine the status or health of your system's storage components.
The Health subtab displays the current status for the storage components. The Health subtab for the Storage tree view object reflects the status of all lower-level objects. For example, if the storage system has been compromised due to a degraded enclosure, both the enclosure Health subtab and the Storage Health subtab display a yellow exclamation point (!) to indicate a Warning severity. See "Storage Component Severity" for more information.
A quick way to review the status of all storage components is to select the Storage tree view object and view the Health subtab. You can click the storage components on the Health subtab to display detailed information about the component.
Component status is indicated by the severity. A component with a Warning or Critical/Failure status requires immediate attention to avoid data loss if possible. It may be useful to review the Alert Log for events indicating why a component has a Warning or Critical status. For additional troubleshooting information, see Alert Messages and Troubleshooting.
The Configuration/Information subtab displays information regarding a storage component. These properties include details such as the number of connectors (channels or ports) on a controller or the Enclosure Management Modules (EMM) firmware version.
The State and Progress properties indicate a component's current activity. For example, an offline physical disk displays the Offline status while the Progress property displays how close to completion an operation (such as a rebuild) is.
The following sections describe the properties for each component:
Storage activity generates alerts or events that are displayed in the Alert Log. Some alerts indicate normal activity and are displayed for informational purposes only. Other alerts indicate abnormal activity which should be addressed immediately. For more information about alerts and their corrective actions, see "Alert Messages".
Storage Management supports Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) on physical disks that are SMART enabled.
SMART performs predictive failure analysis on each disk and sends alerts if a disk failure is predicted. The RAID controllers check physical disks for failure predictions and, if found, pass this information to Storage Management. Storage Management immediately displays an alert icon on the disk. Storage Management also sends an alert to the Alert Log and the Microsoft® Windows® application log.
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NOTE: When a controller's I/O is paused, you will not receive SMART alerts. |
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NOTE: The PERC 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, 4e/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers will not report SMART alerts for unassigned or hot spare disks. |
Some storage components have alarms. When enabled, these alarms alert you when a component fails. See the following sections for more information:
Physical disk enclosures have temperature probes that warn you when the enclosure has exceeded an acceptable temperature range. For more information on using temperature probes, see the following:
The Rescan task scans the storage attached to the controller's connectors (channels or ports) to verify the currently connected devices or to recognize devices that have been added to or removed from the connectors. When you do a rescan on a controller object, all storage attached to the controller is rescanned. Performing a rescan causes the controller to recognize changes in the storage configuration, such as adding or removing physical disks from a virtual disk or changing a RAID level.
You may want to rescan in the following situations:
If you want to rescan all controllers, then do a "Global Rescan". If you want to rescan only the components attached to a particular controller, then do a "Rescan Controller".
When you change the storage configuration, Storage Management quickly generates SNMP traps in response to the configuration changes. The Storage Management MIB (Management Information Base) is also updated to reflect storage configuration changes. It may take up to five minutes, however, to update the MIB with the most recent storage configuration. For this reason, there is a time delay of up to five minutes between the receipt of an SNMP trap and the ability to identify the configuration changes by querying the Storage Management MIB. This time delay is particularly notable when creating a new virtual disk or performing an unmirror or split mirror on a RAID 1-concatenated virtual disk. You can minimize this time delay by performing a controller rescan. See "Rescan Controller" for more information.
Because of hardware restrictions, the PERC 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, 4e/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers will not detect a physical disk status change until I/O is attempted or the system is rebooted.
If the controller has an open communication path to the disk, then performing an I/O operation on the controller updates the disk status. For example, when an unconfigured disk is removed, the controller may not detect the change until a manual rescan is done or other I/O operations are attempted. Likewise, displaying a status change of a virtual disk or one of its member physical disks may require that you do I/O on the controller on which the virtual disk resides.
If, however, the controller has lost the communication path, then rebooting the system is required to update the disk status. Communication loss is evident if the operating system generates I/O errors when you attempt to access data, even though Storage Management displays the disk status as healthy. Once the communication path is restored, reboot the system to update the disk status. If the communication path is not restored, then Storage Management does not display the storage objects after the reboot.
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