[smartmontools-support] Getting smartctl for ESXi/VMWare

[Marcin Szewczyk]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 08:08:03PM -0700, Schorschi Decker wrote:
> Moreover, ESXi already has extensive monitoring explicitly designed to
> integrate to vSphere vCenter in a production environment for such.  With
> vSAN becoming the norm for may production installations, the actual storage
> monitoring is NOT done by ESXi self but by the vSAN nodes themselves...
> which are ESXi based but actually are not fully ESXi, in that the ESXi core
> that supports vSAN was not expected (in production) to host VMs.

Hi,

sorry for a question more about ESXi than smartmontools but I would
appreciate an answer as it would dot the I's.

Regular ESXi seems not only unprepared for automated RAID disks SMART
monitoring but also incapable of getting this kind of information at
all. In my case I can't get it using:

    esxcli storage core device smart get

That is why I considered using smartctl.

So has the vSAN variant more things built in? Like full MegaRAID support
including disks SMART queries for every hardware piece listed in vSAN
Compatibility Guide[1]? I suppose that for a regular ESXi I will need
the StorCLI VIB installed for (in my case) Intel RS2BL040. Would I need
to install it myself on vSAN with such RAID as well?

[1]: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/pdf/vi_vsan_guide.pdf


(Sorry for duplicate email. I missed I wasn't in the recipients list so
my sender address didn't get rewritten when replying.)

-- 
Marcin Szewczyk
http://wodny.org