How do I us OSMA to identify a failed drive’s details & have a drive replaced on a Linux server?

If you do encounter a physical drive with an error and you wish for this drive to be replaced, you will need to provide as much of the following information about the failed drive as possible to our support team, to allow our technicians to correctly identify which drive needs replacing:

1. Serial number

2. Type of drive (e.g. SSD, SATA HDD, SAS HDD, etc.)

3. Capacity

4. Product ID

5. Physical Drive Bay Number

This information will aid the technician in locating the failed drive and swapping it with the correct replacement drive. You can use Dell EMC’s OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) application to find this information.

To find this information, you must first be logged into the server’s root account, then have identify a drive with an error/that has failed. Please see the sections on accessing OMSA and then the section on locating a drive with an error, if you are un-sure how to do this. To locate a drive with an error/which has failed, you should have run the following command:

Command 1
Command Description	The following command lists all the Physical Disks attached to the controller you specify; and all the Physical Disk’s details. Within the command, you must insert the controller number, for the controller you wish to check the status of the physical disks for. You should be able to find this number from the resulting message of commands shown in the identifying storage errors section of the FAQ: omreport storage controller.
Command	omreport storage pdisk controller=[Insert Controller Number]
Image of Command being Run
Image of a Successful Result of Command

Once you have found the physical drive with the error and run the above command, you should be able to identify details about the drive with the error, including the details required by our technicians to locate the drive. See the image below as an example of how to find the necessary information.

If you wish for the drive to be replaced, please supply all the necessary information in a support ticket, requesting for the faulty drive to be replaced, and we will be happy to help. You can also supply a screenshot of the results of the above command.

To work out the drive’s physical bay number, you can use the ID of this drive in conjunction with all the other physical disks’ ID numbers. After running the command above you will be able to see the ID number of all the Physical Disks attached to this controller, which you can use to identify the bay number of the faulty drive. Using the example below, the drive I wish to be replaced is disk 0:1:3, the first drive in the server is disk 0:1:0 and the last drive is 0:1:3. When asking the technicians to replace this disk, simply inform them of the failed drive’s ID number (e.g. 0:1:3) and inform them of the drive’s ID counting format (e.g. 0:1:0 to 0:1:3), as they can use this to locate the physical disk.

In addition to providing the information above, OMSA on most servers will also allow you to set the drive to ‘blink’, which will also help our technician locate the appropriate drive. To get the drive to blink, run the following command. You will need to know the controller’s ID number, for the controller the drive is attached to, and the drive’s ID number, for the drive you wish to blink.

Command 1
Command Description	The following command sets the LED on the drive bay, for the inputted drive, to blink. You need to input the controller ID number and the Physical Disk ID number for the drive you wish to blink.
Command	omconfig storage pdisk action=blink controller=[Insert Controller ID#] pdisk=[Insert PD ID#]
Image of Command being Run
Image of a Successful Result of Command

If you have been able to set the drive to blink, please inform the technicians in the support ticket that you have done so. If you cannot set the drive bay to blink, this is most likely not a hot-swappable chassis, meaning this is not required.

When the technicians have completed any drive swap, you should run the following command to set the drive to ‘un-blink’, to stop the drive bay blinking. It is important to do so, to make sure this drive bay isn’t still blinking while any further drive changes at a later date are taking place, as this may lead to some confusion.

Command 1
Command Description	The following command sets the LED on the drive bay, for the inputted drive, to stop blinking. You need to input the controller ID number and the Physical Disk ID number for the drive you wish to blink.
Command	omconfig storage pdisk action=unblink controller=[Insert Controller ID#] pdisk=[Insert PD ID#]
Image of Command being Run
Image of a Successful Result of Command

Once you provide all this information in a support ticket and set the drive bay to blink (if possible), the local technicians will be able to look into swapping the failed drive.

If the drive is missing from the OMSA monitoring, opposed to having an error, then you will not be able to provide the necessary information listed above to get the drive replaced, nor set the drive bay to blink. Instead, you can provide the information on all the drives that are still present on OMSA and their details in a support ticket, so that by process of elimination the technicians can replace the missing drive.

Once you have provided all the information from the drives that are still present, the technicians should be able to identify the missing drive and replace it.

If you have any further questions about OMSA, please look through our FAQ section. If our FAQ page does not have the answer, please feel free to raise a support ticket, and we will be happy to help.