ESX and LSI MegaRAID

If you have an LSI RAID controller in your ESX host and you would like the LSI RAID health information to show up in vSphere, under Health Status -> Storage, you will need to install the LSI VMware SMIS Provider.  Further, in order to perform CLI RAID commands on the ESX host for the LSI controller, you will need to install the MegaCLI vib package.

I am using the following packages on ESX 5.1 Update 1
VMWare SMIS Provider VIB - MR 5.6
MegaCLI 5.5 P1

And downloaded them from here:
http://www.lsi.com/products/storagecomponents/Pages/MegaRAIDSAS9280-24i4e.aspx

Step 1: Download the vib files from LSI.com.  I found it easier to find them on the product page instead of the LSI download page.

Step 2: scp the vib files over to your ESX host and put them in the /tmp directory

Step 3: SSH to the ESX host and install the vib packages by running the following commands:
/tmp # esxcli software vib install --no-sig-check -v /tmp/vmware-esx-MegaCli-8.07.07.vib
/tmp # esxcli software vib install --no-sig-check -v /tmp/vmware-esx-provider-lsiprovider.vib

Step 4: Shut down any running VMs and Reboot ESX host

Step 5: Power up all your VMs you shut down in Step 4.  NOTE: It will take about 20 minutes for all of the data to show up in the Health Status section.  Also, I had issues with the SMIS Provider randomly stopping on ESX 5.1, and thus upgraded to 5.1 Update 1.

Some useful MegaCLI commands are:
cd /opt/lsi/MegaCLI

Controller information
./MegaCli -AdpAllInfo -aALL
./MegaCli -CfgDsply -aALL

Enclosure information
./MegaCli -EncInfo -aALL

Virtual drive information
./MegaCli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL

Physical drive information
./MegaCli -PDList -aALL

NOTE: If you want to run the MegaRAID Storage Manager from your Windows/Linux system and have it manage the RAID controller in your ESX host, you need to be in the same Layer2 VLAN.  The software uses multicast to find controllers that it can support.  I also found that if your systems are not in DNS, and just have IP addresses, then you MUST add entries for them in the /etc/hosts file or /Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file. If you do not do this then the software will get confused and refer to every device it finds as a NULL string.

Upgrading ESX 5.1 to 5.1 Update 1

A week or so ago, VMware released 5.1 Update 1 (Build Number: 1065491).  This post will show you how to quickly and easily upgrade your system.  If you read VMware's documentation and are still confused, than this should help you.  It is just too bad that VMware has to make everything more complicated than it needs to be.

Step 1: Download zip bundle (update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update01.zip ) not iso from VMware's download site: http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/download.portal When you get to the portal, select "ESXi (Embedded and Installable) from the dropdown. 


Step 2: Copy (scp) the update zip file to your datastore (/vmfs/volumes/datastore1)

Step 3: Shut down all running VMs on the host you want to upgrade

Step 4: SSH to the ESX host you are going to upgrade and run the upgrade command
esxcli software vib install --depot /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update01.zip

Step 5: When the upgrade finishes reboot the ESX host

Step 6: Start all of the VMs that you shutdown in Step 3

Step 7: Upgrade the vmware-tools for each VM that had older versions

Step 8: Upgrade your vSphere application