This depends slightly on the operating systems you’re running on the servers, but in general, it is possible to obtain alerts from HP ProLiant servers and Smart Array RAID controllers. The full driver and software support listing for your DL380 G5 systems is listed here. SNMP and a monitoring solution is the best approach… But … Read more
While the other answer here beings up some points, your specific issues are due to platform limitations and OS configuration: You’re throughput-limited by the use of consumer SATA SSDs on an HP Smart Array P410 RAID controller. SATA disks run at 3.0Gbps (3G) on these controllers rather than 6.0Gbps (6G). So that’s a barrier that … Read more
My favorite example: This can be run from the shell or within the tool. hpacucli ctrl all show config (use hpacucli.exe for Windows) Or hpacucli ctrl all show config detail But, if you have the HP Management Agents installed anyway, you should have realtime monitoring of RAID status pushing back to email alerts or an … Read more
The HP Smart Array P410 is a fine controller, but you will get poor performance out of it if you don’t have the battery-backed or flash-backed cache units installed. The cache makes a tremendous difference in that writes are buffered by the cache memory before being committed to disk. You get the write confirmation to … Read more
Being able to run fstrim on the / partitions would be the best solution however with they way your ESXi is configured it would not be possible. You need to be able to enable discards on both the VM and the storage device. Trying to reduce to size of a partition or logical volume with … Read more
Assuming you’re on a recent firmware revision for the DL320 G6 server. You’re going to have to pay close attention to the POST messages in order to catch the RAID controller’s ORCA utility prompt. The “Sea of Sensors” POST routine takes awhile from the first screen prompt (on a warm-boot) to step through RAM checks … Read more
XFS and EL6 have fallen into an ugly state… I’ve abandoned XFS on EL6 systems for the time being due to several upstream features/changes slipping into the Red Hat kernel… This one was a surprise and caused some panic: Why are my XFS filesystems suddenly consuming more space and full of sparse files? Since November … Read more
Okay. This is an interesting question, as there are a number of options available to you. Some concepts to clarify and understand, as they relate to this situation: Perceptions of “speed” or “fast”. RAID controller performance. SAS topology. Benchmarking a system and/or identifying bottlenecks. In order to get the maximum performance, we really need each … Read more
If you simply delete the volume in the RAID BIOS that exposes the disks directly in some versions of the SmartArray controllers. We always use the controller even with things like ZFS.
I’ve covered SSD interoperability and compatibility issues with HP servers several times here. Check these posts: HP D2700 enclosure and SSDs. Will any SSD work? Are there any SAN vendors that allow third party drives? So, the move from G6 and G7 HP ProLiants to the Gen8 variants forced a disk carrier form-factor change. HP … Read more