Re: [Freeipmi-users] IPMI and the HP smart array

[Albert Chu]

Hi Daniele,

> I was wondering if anyone has ever managed to get status info of the 
> HP Smart Array Controller and the disks behind it over IPMI and if 
> so, how?

Although there are technically feasible ways this can happen, the odds
are low.  I've never seen a vendor store SDR information in an alternate
location.

> If not, is there some dark path I can go down to try and figure out if
> the information is actually available through some kind of vendor
> specific extension that the tools just don't expose yet?

An OEM extension to receive this information is the far more likely
candidate for your scenario.  If you look through the manpage for
ipmi-oem, you'll see that some storage monitoring extensions were
available on some Fujitsu motherboards.

Fujitsu was kind enough to publish their OEM extensions in a publicly
accessible document.  I'm not sure if HP has such a history publishing
things online.  A quick google search found me nothing.

The next best bet is to ask HP if they have extensions available.  If
they can open up the documents publicly (i.e. non-NDA) they can be
programmed into ipmi-oem.  Otherwise, you'd have to stick to using
ipmi-raw to deal with the raw hex codes (or program them into ipmi-oem
for your own local build).

Hope that helps,

Al

On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 11:43 +0200, Daniele Sluijters wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I'm currently trying to build something to monitor a bunch of HP
> servers remotely through IPMI. Now I've managed to use the freeipmi
> and ipmitool binaries to get just about any information I need from
> our machines:
> some-tool -D LAN_2_0 -u USER -P -h hostname
> 
> This works wonderfully well, except for one thing, I can't get any
> information about the Smart Array Controller and the disks connected
> to it. I've called HP Business Support and their answer was 'Yeah if
> you get rid of the Smart Array Controller it would probably work
> because you'd be able to read the SATA ports'. I've also posted on the
> HP discussions board about this but I'm doubtful I'll get anything
> useful,
> http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/iLO-IPMI-and-Smart-Array-controller/m-p/5830105.
> 
> Ditching the Smart Array Controller is not an option for us but I
> can't really imagine that not even a single engineer at HP thought 'oh
> wait, it might be useful to expose disk and array status through
> IPMI'. I was wondering if anyone has ever managed to get status info
> of the HP Smart Array Controller and the disks behind it over IPMI and
> if so, how?
> 
> If not, is there some dark path I can go down to try and figure out if
> the information is actually available through some kind of vendor
> specific extension that the tools just don't expose yet?
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> --
> Daniele Sluijters
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory