Dell PowerEdge

Using an Non Dell SSD as a CacheCade on a Dell PowerEdge

February 15, 2012 by Paulie 7 Comments

I’ve been itching to try out the LSI CacheCade technology since reading this review:

http://www.storagereview.com/lsi_megaraid_cachecade_pro_20_review

The LSI CacheCade Technology is now included with Dell PowerEdge Servers that have the PERC H700 1GB Raid controller installed. What I have been unable to determine from the Dell documentation is if the Dell PERC Controllers support CacheCade V2.0 or the original specification.

It has been said that it is not possible to add drives that are not factory fitted by Dell to an existing server and I am happy to report that the Intel 520 seems to work without issue. Perhaps this is a change that Dell made to the controller firmware.

I really wanted a high performance SSD that carries a long warranty and Intel seem to be the only vendor that offer that at the moment.

Installing the SSD inside an R510 is really easy and it is quite a neat setup as you don’t lose any of your main storage bays as the server has two internal 2.5″ drive bays:

The Drive Itself:

The internal 2.5″ Drive Bays (Notice the included screws atop of the bays, a nice touch) :

Dell PowerEdge R510 2.5" Drive Bays to house an SSD for Cachecade usage — Dell PowerEdge R510 2.5″ Drive Bays

The internal 2.5″ Drive Bays with the Intel 520 120GB SSD installed:

Once the drive is installed, go into Raid Controllers BIOS configuration utility (CTRL+R) and you should see the newly added Intel drive listed:

Highlight your controller and press F2 and a list of available tasks is displayed. Choose “Create CacheCade Virtual Disk”:

Select the SSDs that you want to add to your Cachecade virtual disk. I’ve not tried it with more than one:

And hopefully you will get a successfully created message:

CacheCade can only be set-up on the DELL PERC H700 with 1GB memory. So don’t go splashing out on an SSD if you don’t have that RAID controller. I presume it will also work on a H800 with 1GB, but don’t have one in this machine to test it.

Have not had a chance to do any performance comparison as yet, and it is a shame that there are no tools to actually show you if the CacheCade is active or to provide any statistics.

Email alerts from Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA)

September 8, 2011 by Paulie 146 Comments

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator can execute an application when a fault is detected in the hardware, unfortunately there is no built in e-mail support, so this PowerShell can send the email for you without the need for any additional software.

The script will:

Send an email to a specified recipient.
Include information about the system from “omreport chasis info”.
Attach the System Alert Log to the email.

Example e-mail alert from Dell OpenManage

How to install the alert script:

Download the Dell Alert Script
Extract it to a folder on your system, e.g. “C:\Script”
Edit the variables at the top of the script to configure your email setup

Image showing variables within PowerShell script used to send email alerts from Dell OpenManage Server Administrator — If you do not specify an SMTP Server, it will default to using the local machine.

Test Email functionality

Now that you have the script and have configured your SMTP options do the following:

Open PowerShell.
Run the script with the “testemail” parameter e.g:
c:\script\OMSA_Alert.ps1 testemail
Check your email, if everything worked you should received a test alert.

Setup email alerts from Dell OpenManage

Once the email function has been tested you can go ahead and setup the script to run from Dell OpenManage:

Open PowerShell
Run the script with the “Setup” Parameter e.g:
c:\script\OMSA_Alert.ps1 setup
The script will generate batch files in the directory where you run the script. These batch files are what will be executed by OMSA.

Generate a test alert from your server

Here are some methods to test the script with a real alert:

Open the server case, this will generate a chassis intrusion alert.
If you have a dual power supply system, pull the power to one of the supplies and the server should report the power loss.
Trigger a temperature alert:
- In OMSA go to:
  System -> Main System Chassis -> Temperatures
- Set the Maximum Warning Threshold a couple of degrees lower than the current reading.

Image of Temperature Probe on a Dell Server within OpenManage 9.3

This is an update to a script I originally wrote in 2010 in VBScript. I then wrote a new version in Powershell. I’ve now updated it again to provide compatibility with Dell OpenManage 9.3. The omconfig command produced the error:

Error! No application exists in the specified path.

The original VBScript version is included in the download, and the updated PowerShell version.

Dell Openmanage Server Administrator Email Alerts for Linux

October 2, 2010 by Paulie 30 Comments

Earlier this year I posted a script which sends email alerts from Dell servers using the alerting system built into Dell Openmanage. However, that script will only work on Windows systems.

A visitor to the blog called Steve has kindly posted some code on that post which enables the same functionality in Linux and I think it is worthy of its own post.

Before attempting to use the script you will need to download this perl script called sendEmail and that you have unix2dos installed.

The script accepts two arguments, which are setup or show.

“setup” will set the alerts action to the value of $alert_script which should be the full path to the script itself.
“show” will print the current alert settings for the system to the screen.

The code of the script is as follows, or you can download from here:



#!/usr/bin/perl

########

#

# Alter these setting to suit your system

$alert_script='/opt/asx_scripts/send_alert.pl';

$argument = 0;

$argument = $ARGV[0];

$omreport = '/opt/dell/srvadmin/bin/omreport';

$omconfig = '/opt/dell/srvadmin/bin/omconfig';

$sendemail = '/opt/asx_scripts/sendEmail';

$toname = 'name';

$fromname = 'name';

$domain = 'domain.com';

$tmp_path = '/tmp';

$mail_gateway = 'ip or name of mailgate';

$unix2dos = '/usr/bin/unix2dos';

#

#

if(“$argument” eq “setup”){
set_available_alerts();
exit;
}
if(“$argument” eq “show”){
display_set_alerts();
exit;
}
if(“$argument” eq “help”){
print “If you need some help read the code\n”;
exit;
}
unless($argument){
$desc=`$omreport system alertlog 2>/dev/null | grep “Description” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($desc);
$date=`$omreport system alertlog 2>/dev/null | grep “Date and Time” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //g’ | sed ‘s/://g’`;
chomp($date);
$host=`$omreport system summary 2>/dev/null | grep “Host Name” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($host);
$tag=`$omreport system summary 2>/dev/null | grep “Chassis Service Tag” | head -1 | cut -f2-9 -d: | sed ‘s/ //’`;
chomp($tag);
$attach=”$tmp_path/$date.log”;
`$omreport system alertlog > “$attach”`;
if( -f “$unix2dos”){
`$unix2dos “$attach” 2>/dev/null`;
}
$send=`$sendemail -f “$fromname\@$domain” -t “$toname\@$domain” -u “System Error: $host SvcTag: $tag Time: $date” -m “$host SvcTag: $tag Error: $desc Time: $date” -a “$attach” -s “$mail_gateway”`;
}else{
print “If you need some help read the code\n”;
exit;
}

sub set_available_alerts {
$alert_list = `$omconfig system alertaction 2>/dev/null | cut -f2 -d”<” | cut -f1 -d”>”`;
chomp($alert_list);
chomp($alert_list);
@split_alert_list = split(/\|/, $alert_list);
foreach my $alert (@split_alert_list){
$set_result = `$omconfig system alertaction event=$alert execappath=”$alert_script” 2>/dev/null | head -1`;
chomp($set_result);
if(“$set_result” eq “Alert action(s) configured successfully.”){
print “Set Action:\t$alert\n”;
}else{
print “ERROR Set didnt return expected value ($set_result)\n”;
}
}
}
sub display_set_alerts {
$currently_set = `$omreport system alertaction`;
print “$currently_set\n”;
}

exit;

A good way to test the script is to temporarily set the “Temperature Maximum” to something low like 12 to trigger an alert.

Unfortunately all of my Linux machines are virtual machines so I cannot test or modify this script, so if anyone wants to give me SSH access to a server running OMSA, be my guest. 🙂

Again, big thanks to Steve for posting this and I am sure it will be useful to lots of people. This has also inspired me to make some improvements to my original Windows version.

Script to generate email alerts from Dell Openmanage (OMSA)

March 12, 2010 by Paulie 201 Comments

Dell Openmanage Server Administrator is a really useful tool for configuring and monitoring server hardware but it lacks built in E-Mail alerts.

It is capable of executing scripts when a server alert is triggered so I have written a simple script in VBScript that provides the missing E-Mail alert functionality.

Updated version of this script

Many people land on this page, while the script and instructions on this page still work, there is an updated post with new information, please see this post:

https://www.tachytelic.net/2011/09/dell-poweredge-email-alerts/

How to configure email alerts from Dell Open Manage

Download the script
Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder on your machine
Edit the top of the script to make the SMTP settings appropriate for your environment:

If a remote SMTP server is not specified the script will try to use the local machine to send the E-Mail.
Test the email functionality by running:
cscript dellalert.vbs testemail
Setup the alerts by running:
cscript dellalert.vbs setup
Once this is done you should be able to see that the script has been added into OMSA:

Now you need to generate some real alerts to test the script properly. How you do this will depend on the capabilities of your server, I was able to disconnect the redundant power supply and have an alert generated almost immediately. Opening the case will also generate an event on some servers. Hopefully you should get something like this in your Inbox:

Let me know how you get on and leave any questions in the comments area.