SmartArray

HOWTO: Turn on a HDD UID on a HPE Proliant in VMware with HPSSACLI

@DeanColpittsLeave a comment

This morning we needed to replace a hard drive in a HPE Proliant running VMware ESXi at a remote site that had a PFA on it.  Unfortunately, while ILO is great at identifying the defective drive, it has no ability to enable the UID on the drive, and given that this unit is at a remote site, we had no way of knowing in advanced if the fault light was actually turn on for this drive before the HPE field engineering arrived to swap the drive.  So after digging through the help documentation, I found the necessary HPSSACLI command to enable the drive’s UID.

First, to get a list of all the physical drives in an ESXi host, SSH the host and run this command:

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl slot=0 physicaldrive all show

This should output a list of all the drives in the system as shown below.

2016.05.19 - 10.14.13 - SNAGIT - 0005

Next, to enable the blue UID LED for 1 hour on port 2I, box 1, bay 2, run this command:

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl slot=0 physicaldrive 2I:1:8 modify led=on duration=3600

The blue UID should now come on for 1 hour and then shut off on it’s own.  If you want want to manually shut if off before the 1 hour is up, run the same command again, but change the “led=on” to “led=off”.

As always – Use any tips, tricks, or scripts I post at your own risk.

HOWTO: Monitor the rebuild status of a HPE SmartArray in ESXi 5.5

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To monitor the rebuild status of a HP SmartArray controller in VMware ESXi 5.5, you need to have the HP VMware tools bundle installed (which is installed if the server was installed from the HP VMware media / ISO).  Once the tools bundle has been installed, simply SSH the server (or go right on the console, either physically or via ILO), login and run:

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl all show status

This will provide you a list of all the SmartArray controllers in the server.  From this list, find the slow number of the controller that contains the logical drive you need to check the status on and run the following command (substitute slot=XX for the slot value you determined with the previous command):

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl slot=XX ld all show

2016.04.14 - 09.12.11 - SNAGIT - 0000

If you happen to running an older version of ESXi 5.x, or your HP VMware Tools bundle is not somewhat recent, then the commands are somewhat different.  In this case the correct commands are:

/opt/hp/hpacucli/bin/hpacucli
ctrl all show
ctrl slot=0 ld all show