Thank you!

I'm intending to buy such controler to my Dell 690P workstation. and i will check this problem.

Regards

zilkael@013.net

Right on with your comments on Perc 5/i! As of 7/6/07 I too have come to a dead end. No answers from dell on monitoring the health of the RAID array. In my prototype system (4 drive array) from Dell, I was able to see events in the event log when the RAID array had a drive failure. With health monitor, I was able to create a rule to email me when that event occured. But in the production system (3 drive array with hot spare, wiped, new array, reload), I have yet to be able to reproduce my initial success. When I have a drive failure, the hot swap spare automatically kicks in but no event log message is reported hence no notification of a drive failure. This is pure BS. Notification upon a drive failure is so easy to impliment at the driver level. Someone dropped the ball here. I find it frustrating that Dell product development cannot do better.

Along with the lack of audible alarm, if you purchased a Dell Perc5/i RAID controller card (not necessary a cheap investment) with a Precision workstation, be aware that it will come WITHOUT a card battery backup unit (BBU).

This was surprising as you would think it would have been a fairly trivial cost addition relative to the price of the $599 card.  I spent hours trying to order it as a spare part from Dell, but with no luck.

I've written a cron job that I've set to execute every minute.  With each run, it blasts every open tty with a message from Dell's OMSA software if it finds a drive that has failed or is about to fail, and it sends mail to the root account (or its alias) if a drive's rebuilding.  It's meant to be insanely annoying to demonstrate just how important it is that it get fixed.  I run a small lab, so it's important to me that anyone using the system would be able to know that something's up.  The rebuilding part may be omitted, but I like to check up on the status of any rebuilding drive.  I'm sure there are tons of tweaks to it that a more experienced programmer could make (like sending messages to SMS servers, sending non-local e-mails), but I've tried to keep it simple for now.  It's posted it below, in hopes that it can help people out:

~~~

#! /bin/sh

###################################################

# Checks RAID array to ensure that drives have not

# gone critical and are not predicted to fail.  If

# something is amiss, hammer out a notice to

# ensure that the faulty drive is replaced before

# a second failure.  While it's repairing, mail a

# notice to root informing root of rebuilding

# progress.

#

# Depends on Dell's OMSA being installed; tested

# on PERC 5/i HW RAID card on Dell PowerEdge 2900

# running Debian etch.

#

# Meant to be run in root's crontab.

###################################################

# Assigns script variables

# Edit these values to correspond to your hardware

# and software configuration

CONTROLLER=0

MAIL_ROOT="root"

###################################################

#DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE!

###################################################

# Locates omreport on this system

OMREPORT=`which omreport`

GREP=`which grep`

WALL=`which wall`

MAIL=`which mail`

# Checks status of RAID array

# First, checks for critical failure and sends messages to all ttys if failure has occurred

RAID_CRITICAL=`$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP Critical`

if [ -n "$RAID_CRITICAL" ]; then

   echo `$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP -B 3 -A 2 Critical` | $WALL

   exit 1

fi

# Next, checks for predicted failure and sends messages to all ttys if failure is predicted

RAID_FAILURE=`$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP "Failure Predicted         : Yes"`

if [ -n "$RAID_FAILURE" ]; then

   echo `$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP -B 4 "Failure Predicted         : Yes"` | $WALL

   exit 2

fi

# Finally, checks for rebuilding of array and sends messages to root if rebuilding

RAID_REBUILDING=`$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP Rebuilding`

if [ -n "$RAID_REBUILDING" ]; then

   echo `$OMREPORT storage pdisk controller=$CONTROLLER | $GREP -B 3 -A 2 Rebuilding` | $MAIL -s "RAID array rebuilding" "$MAIL_ROOT"

   exit 3

fi

I just purchased a PERC 5/i daughter card for my Poweredge 1900 running Windows 2003 Server. I ran across your coments when I was searching for instructions on how to install the daughter card. I think that it fits into slot 4 on the motherboard, but I have no idea where to place the battery that came with it.  The battery does not attach to the daughtercard. I couldn't find good instructions at the dell iste or on the documentation that came with the 1900.

You can use the LSI software, as the Perc 5/i is really an Dell OEM version of the LSI MegaRAID SAS 8408E, with a few minor differences.

MegaRAID Storage Manager can email alerts to a set email address if something goes wrong.

www.lsi.com/.../index.html

And, Looplocal, you can pick a BBU off eBay for sometimes as little as $15, so all is not lost! :) - I bought a whole kit, battery, cable and holder for $30.

I stumbled on this while looking for answers to performance problems with the perc 5/i. Before going live, I've run iozone on it and write performance with 7 drives in raid 5 is atrocious! I haven't yet figured out why, and the card will have to get returned if I don't because an array with 4 disks is 3 time faster doing writes than a 7 disk array.

Yes, the LSI software works fine. Peculiar that DELL didn't take that "part" of the LSI-controller into their software.

James has got the best info.. Go to LSI webpage and download the MegaRAID Storage Manager, it is the exact same software, but has email notifications enabled.

For some reason Dell stripped out the SNMP section of the LSI software, which is the part that does the notifications.  Great job Dell!

Thanks for that info.  I managed to find the kit as suggested.  Once I had the part number Dell was able to provide via the Spare Parts department.

I installed the BBU, but how does one know it is recognized? My Perc 5 BIOS enabled  configuration does not give any info other than the warning after checking write back even without bbu option.  Any idea on how to know if a Perc 5 bbu is installed and identified by the bios correctly?  Will the Perc 5 BIOS config always give the Write Back/BBU warning even if a BBU is installed?

Thanks for any info.

loop

Please forgive my BBU question.  I installed the MegaRaid as suggested by James and that provides an abundance of info (unlike the BIOS config) including the BBU identification.

BBU Present?   YES !

At the LSI site, there seems to be a more aggressive driver and firmware availability compared to Dell.  

Any thoughts on if it is advisable to go with LSI's driver and firmware releases instead of Dell's outdated ones?  There seems to be quite a few bug fixes and many Vista enhancements/fixes.

I see that you posted this about a year ago, I was wondering if any progress has been made on this issue. I am running into the exact same problem, we deployed numerous Dell servers to our clients only to find that they have no alert system. while some of the clients have workstations, others do not.

I've had a few comments show up on the series of PERC 5/i posts I had early in 2007. There have been

Loop - can you post the part number for the BBU? - is it the G3399?

Great blog article.  Very helpful.  I'm in the process of putting together a PowerEdge 1900 with Perc 5/i running CentOS 5.1 64-bit for vmware server 1.0.5.  Hope to run a Windows and Novell virtual machines on it.

I'm going to try out an altered script that Stephen B. wrote.  If I can't get that to work then I'll use the LSI MegaRAID Storage manager.  My concern with running the LSI product is that I'm using Dell's megaraid_sas driver version 3.16 and LSI's latest driver is 3.13.

I couldn't get the script above to work (my bash didn't like the pipe command in the variables), so I created this one using perl.  

#!/usr/bin/perl

# A simple perl program to send alerts if problem found with physical disks

# by using OMSA 5.2 for Dell PowerEdge

# I do not provide any guarantee that this script will work. Use at own risk.

#Written: May 2008

#By: Jerod H

$controller="0";

$emailaddress="jerod\@yourdomain.com";

$omreport="/usr/bin/omreport";

$mail="/bin/mail";

$servername="yourservername";

# run omreport command and put into olist

open(LS, "$omreport storage pdisk controller=$controller |");

while() {

chomp;

push @olist, $_;

}

close(LS);

# Go through each line in olist to look for "Critical", "Rebuilding", or

# "Failure Predicted : YES"

$email=0;

$subject="";

foreach $line(@olist){

if ($line =~ /Critical$/i) {

$email=1;

$subject="$servername Hard Drive Critical";

}

if ($line =~ /Failure$/i) {

$email=1;

$subject="$servername Hard Drive Rebuilding";

}

if ($line =~ /^Failure\sPredicted(\s)+:\sYes$/i) {

$email=1;

$subject="$servername Hard Drive Predicted to Fail";

}

}

#If something was found email will = 1 so send email

if ($email==1) {

system("$omreport storage pdisk controller=$controller | $mail -s '$subject' $emailaddress");

}

I think Dell should place the alarm on the controller.  Those admins who do not want the alarm can disable it like you could before yanking it from the card.

Hi!

Im going for a 2900, is the Perc 6/i any better?