I did finally get OMSA running fully on the Dell Poweredge 1955 blade with the SAS 5/iR (LSI SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS) RAID controller (Not PERC5, apparently, which means its the mptsas driver and not megaraid_sas like PERC5). This confirmed my suspicion that ‘omreport storage controller’ listing the device as degraded was because the firmware was below the ‘minimum firmware’ version and not because of the virtual disk which ‘omreport storage vdisk’ listed as Ready and OK. Rainer Sabelka helped me out again noting that you could run the RHEL firmware update off support.dell.com.

The hard part was that I kept selecting RHEL5 in the pull downs, finding the utiltity and clicking “Download Now” which would send the standard Dell self-extracting executable which was very dos looking. I was thinking maybe you could take the firmware file and use some utility to upgrade it, whatever replaced omupgrade. Eventually I found that if you click on the file on dells site instead of download now, it gives you additional options, one of which is a BIN file for redhat. You can download this, chmod 755 it, and run it. It’ll less the release notes, then start the install when you say y. I shut down all the dell omsa stuff via init.d scripts before running this based on recommendations in the release notes. I think ‘file.bin –version’ brings up the notes such that ‘q’ just exits instead of continuing the install. Note that the install doesn’t force a reboot at the end, but recommends it. I didn’t see any changes in the omreport output until the reboot, so you’ll want to do the upgrade when you can reboot to avoid possible wonkyness.

As a side note, this is a decent starting place for Debian on Poweredge gear, although it says:

The three PowerEdge components that cause the most difficulty for new Debian sysadmins are the PERC 5 SAS RAID controllers (megaraid_sas driver), the SAS 5 non-RAID controllers (mptsas driver), and the Broadcom gigabit network adapters (bnx2 driver).

Which is a little confusing as the 1955 only has the mptsas driver running under etch, not the megaraid_sas, but it’s obviously doing raidish things and since we’re talking about linux and not windows I was thinking it wasn’t fakeraid. This is doubly interesting though:

vmware14:/proc/scsi# cat scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAY2073RC Rev: D108
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: FUJITSU Model: MAY2073RC Rev: D108
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Host: scsi0 Channel: 01 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: Dell Model: VIRTUAL DISK Rev: 1028
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05

So it shows both disks, which are “raid1” and this “Virtual Disk”. Theres some jabber here about how it’s not RAID because it’s showing the disk and the other agrees and claims faulty assumptions, but there’s no reference or linkage. Here a Dell engineerish guy says “Yes the SAS 5/iR is just very light weight hardware RAID.”

Supposedly theres an ‘lsiutil’ package hiding in a driver package somewhere but I couldn’t find it in a brief search. The OMSA utilities appear to be working, although I still haven’t tried SNMP yet.