PERC access from VM (under VMWare ESXi)

[David Duncan]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Joshua Daniel Franklin
<jdf.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any way for a RHEL VM to access hardware such as a PERC
> controller under ESXi (aka "ESX embedded")? I'm guessing no, but
> there is a lot of expertise on this list and there may be a workaround.
>
> This strikes me as a major limitation of ESXi since there is no way to
> install OMSA or other tools that, for example, can run a "Patrol Read"
> across disks to protect against read failures that SMART or RAID
> do not detect.

<snip!>

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/EN/VES_3i/Systems%20Management%20Document/PDF/MSMPA01.pdf
 documents what is available from the ESXi environemnt.

>From what I understand, there are some hooks in the embedded version
that do monitor that do give you some monitoring capabilites via the
Virtual Infrastructure Client.  CIM hooks to the hardware for
monitoring.

The only other thing that I can think you might want to do in terms of
a RAID controller is instigate a consistency check or reconfigure the
raid container.  The consistency checks are automated in the raid
controller now.  Patrol read handles that.  Expanding the containers
will have to be done offline.  I assume that your virtualization
strategy includes more than one server for high availability.  .



-- 
David Duncan

Registered Linux User #279425
http://counter.li.org