Array Diagnostic Utility reports in VMware ESXi

Ram Karan | June 20, 2018

General

This blog post shows you how to generate an Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU) report on an Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) server that is running VMware® ESXi™ version 5.x or 6.x. The information in this blog helps you to determine whether the ADU is installed. If it is not installed, you can use the steps provided in this blog to install it.

Introduction

When you call Hewlett-Packard (HP) support about drive, array controller, battery, or related hardware failure issues, the first piece of information that they ask for is the ADU report. HP offers customized installation ISO files for ESXi version 5.x and 6.0, which include drivers for HP-specific hardware, their offline bundles for hardware monitoring, and useful tools like hpssacli and hpacucli (used for managing Smart Array adapters). If you installed the HP-provided ESXi image, the HP drivers and other management utilities are already available. If you didn’t use the HP-provided ESXi image, download and install the HP ESXi Utilities offline bundle for ESXi version 5.x or 6.x.

Determine whether hpacucli is installed

The following steps help you to determine whether hpacucli is installed on your server:

In the ESXi Shell console, enter ls and look for the opt directory.
If opt is present, enter cd /opt to change to opt.
Type the ls command and look for the hp directory.
If you found the hp directory, enter cd hp to change to the hp directory.
Enter ls and look for a file called hpacucli. If you find that file, users can generate the ADU Report.

The following image shows the preceding steps:

Install the hpcucli utility

If hpcucli is not already installed on your server, download the hpcucli offline bundle and upload it to tmp (or any other directory) by using an ftp client tool like winscp. For example, download hpacucli-9.40-12.0.vib from https://vibsdepot.hpe.com/hpq/feb2013/esxi-5x-vibs/hpacucli/ to the tmp directory. To install it, run the following command:

#esxcli software vib install –f –v /tmp/ hpacucli-9.40-12.0.vib

After it is installed, enter the following command to make the file executable:

/opt/hp/hpacucli/bin # ./hpacucli

Generate an ADU report

To generate and save an ADU report, use the following steps:

Connect to your host from the console or by using PuTTy over SSH and browse to the /opt/hp directory.

Run the following command to list the available controllers:

/opt/hp # esxcli hpssacli cmd –q “controller all show status”

Run the following command to generate an array configuration report:

    /opt/hp # esxcli hpssacli cmd –q “controller slot=0  show config detail”

Save the report by running the following command:

/opt/hp # esxcli hpssacli cmd –q “controller slot=0 show config detail” >>/tmp/ADUreport.txt

Conclusion

This blog provides useful information about the ADU utility and how to use it to generate reports for ESXi.

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Ram Karan