How do I use OSMA to identify a failed drive’s details and have it replaced on a VMware ESXI 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 allow our technicians to correctly identify which drive needs replacing:

1. Serial number

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

3. Capacity

4. Product ID

5. Physical Drive Bay Number

This information will aid our 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 first need to use OMSA on your home/work computer to access OMSA on your server, and then locate the Physical Disk with the error. Please see the sections on accessing OMSA and then the section on investigating storage/storage errors to locate the failed drive, if you are un-sure how to do this. Once you have found the physical drive with the error, you will be able to click the button to find more 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 from the details of a physical drive. You can also provide a screenshot of the failed drive’s details.

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. If you return to the list of all the Physical Disks, you can see the drive I wish to be replaced is disk 0:1:1, 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 drive, simply inform them of the failed drive’s ID number (e.g. 0:1:0) and inform them of the drive’s ID counting format (e.g. 0:1:0 to 0:1:3), as they should be able use this to locate the physical disk. You can also provide a screenshot of this page.

In addition to providing the information above, OMSA on most servers will also allow you to set the drive to ‘blink’, which can be used to help the technician locate the appropriate drive. To get the drive to blink, while on the page which lists all the Physical Disks, set the task to ‘blink’ in-line with the drive you wish to be swapped and then press Execute. This will then make the LED light on the drive’s caddy blink.

If you are able to set the drive to blink, please inform the technicians in the support ticket that you have done so. Some chassis may not allow you to perform this action, however. If you cannot set the drive bay to blink, this is most likely a non-hot-swappable chassis, meaning this is not required.

When the technicians have completed any drive swap, you can use this same process to set the drive to ‘un-blink’, using the ‘un-blink’ task, to stop the drive bay blinking. It is important to do this, to make sure this drive bay isn’t still blinking during any further drive changes at a later date, as this may lead to some confusion.

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

If the drive is missing from the OMSA monitoring completely (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 still present on OMSA and their details, so that by process of elimination our 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.