Quick Access to Storage Status and Tasks
This section describes various methods to determine the status or health of your system's storage components and how to quickly launch available controller tasks.
Storage Dashboard and Storage Health
For each controller, the Storage Health tab or Storage Dashboard displays a summary of the controller severity (health or status) and a task menu for launching the controller tasks. A link is provided to access virtual disk status and tasks.
Storage Health
The Storage Dashboard displays the combined status for each controller and lower-level storage components. For example, if the health of the storage system has been compromised due to a degraded enclosure, both the enclosure Health subtab and the controller severity on the Storage Dashboard display a yellow exclamation mark to indicate a Warning severity. If a controller on the Storage Dashboard displays a Warning or Critical status, take the following actions to investigate the cause of the Warning or Critical status:
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Click Check Alert Log displayed to the right of the controller. This link displays the Alert Log. Examine the Alert Log for alerts relating to the status of the controller and its lower-level components. The Check Alert Log link is only displayed when the controller displays a Warning or Critical status. |
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Select the controller and investigate the status of the lower-level components. For more information, see Storage Component Severity. |
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Click the virtual disk that is in degraded state to display the Physical Disk Properties page. |
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NOTE: The virtual disk link is displayed only if the physical disks that are part of the virtual disk, are in a Warning or Critical state. |
For more information on how the status of lower-level components is rolled up into the status displayed for the controller, see Determining the Health Status for Storage Components.
Hot Spare Protection Policy
The Set Hot Spare Protection Policy task allows you to set or modify the number of hot spares to be assigned to the virtual disks.
Once you set the number of assigned hot spares, any deviation from the protection policy threshold triggers an alert based on the severity level you set.
For more information, see Setting Hot Spare Protection Policy.
Select Report
The Select Report option provides the following reports: Patrol Read, Consistency Check, and Slot Occupancy. For more information, see Patrol Read Report, Check Consistency Report, Slot Occupancy Report.
Storage Component Severity
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. A component's status may indicate the combined status of the component and its lower-level objects. For more information, see Determining the Health Status for Storage Components.
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 Troubleshooting.
Storage Properties and Current Activity
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:
Alerts or Events
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 the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Messages Reference Guide at support.dell.com/manuals.
Monitoring Disk Reliability on RAID Controllers
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 do not receive SMART alerts. |
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NOTE: The PERC 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, and 4e/Di controllers do not report SMART alerts for unassigned or hot spare disks. |
Related Information:
Using Alarms to Detect Failures
Some storage components have alarms. When enabled, these alarms alert you when a component fails. For more information, see the following sections:
Using Enclosure Temperature Probes
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:
Rescan to Update Storage Configuration Changes
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:
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To see new disks attached to the controller. |
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To make the operating system recognize a virtual disk. |
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To make Storage Management display a new virtual disk. |
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After expanding a virtual disk, you may need to rescan the controller so that the virtual disk can use the additional disk space. |
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To update the status of an offline disk. |
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To display updated information in a clustered configuration after a failover of cluster resources. |
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NOTE: For SCSI controller-based systems, if you want to rescan all controllers, perform the procedure in Global Rescan. If you want to rescan only the components attached to a particular controller, perform the procedure in Rescan Controller. |
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NOTE: Clicking the Refresh button in the right pane refreshes only the right pane. To view the new physical disk in the left pane tree view, click the system name displayed at the top of the left pane, or select View→Refresh from the browser's menu bar. |
Related Information:
Time Delay in Displaying Configuration Changes
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. However, it may take up to five minutes 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. For more information, see Rescan Controller.
I/O and Reboot Requirements for Detecting Physical Disk Status Changes
This section applies to PERC 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, and 4e/Di controllers
Because of hardware restrictions, the PERC 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, and 4e/Di controllers do 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 an I/O operation 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.
Related Information: