How to check disk under ESXi?

skyripper

skyripper

skyripper

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I've got a Microserver. Running ESXi 5.5.

Currently have 3x 1TB WD Greens. Just bought 3x 4TB Seagate NAS drives.
The WDs are about 6yrs old now and never skipped a beat. They've been in the ESXi box for about a year.

Am in the process of copying the datastores from each smaller drive to each newer drive. In this way I plan to boot my VMs without them knowing the hardware has changed underneath.

First WD -> Seagate went perfect. Took hours!

Running into errors when copying the contents of the second WD. Am using the vSphere Client to do this.

How do I check which device is causing the problem, and is there anything I can do in terms of disk checking etc?
I'd like to know if its my 2nd WD, or my 2nd new Seagate.

A lot of what I am finding online says use the vCenter tools etc., but as a home user I doubt I can get hold of these.

Any help out there?
 
Smart data I've pulled from the Seagate;

Parameter Value Threshold Worst
---------------------------- ----- --------- -----
Health Status OK N/A N/A
Media Wearout Indicator N/A N/A N/A
Write Error Count N/A N/A N/A
Read Error Count 102 6 99
Power-on Hours 100 0 100
Power Cycle Count 100 20 100
Reallocated Sector Count 100 10 100
Raw Read Error Rate 102 6 99
Drive Temperature 29 0 40
Driver Rated Max Temperature 71 45 69
Write Sectors TOT Count 200 0 200
Read Sectors TOT Count N/A N/A N/A
Initial Bad Block Count 100 99 100

And from the WD:

Parameter Value Threshold Worst
---------------------------- ----- --------- -----
Health Status OK N/A N/A
Media Wearout Indicator N/A N/A N/A
Write Error Count N/A N/A N/A
Read Error Count 200 51 200
Power-on Hours 70 0 70
Power Cycle Count 99 0 99
Reallocated Sector Count 200 140 200
Raw Read Error Rate 200 51 200
Drive Temperature 114 0 108
Driver Rated Max Temperature N/A N/A N/A
Write Sectors TOT Count 200 0 200
Read Sectors TOT Count 200 0 200
Initial Bad Block Count N/A N/A N/A
 
What are you using to do the copy? Command line, SCP, Datastore browser?

If these are giving problems you could try the 'vCenter Converter'. The name suggests you need vcenter, but you don't, you can use it directed at an ESXi host.
 
Just using the Datastore browser. That doesnt do something silly like use the client as an intermediary to move stuff from one disk to another does it?
 
Right now I'm putty'd into the ssh server, and kicked off the following

cp /vmfs/volumes/WD_Green2/Nas4Free/*.* /vmfs/volumes/Seagate_NAS_2/Nas4Free/

Will see how it goes and if any useful messages come up. The vClient didnt give very much useful info.

I'm well outside my comfort zone doing this unix/linux stuff, but I'll give it a go.
 
skyripper said:
That doesnt do something silly like use the client as an intermediary to move stuff from one disk to another does it?
Click to expand...

I don't believe so, no. But it does mask a lot of files from view, which makes me dubious using it to move entire VM's.
Try it using command line and you'll see how much the Datastore Browser hides from you.

If command line worries you then Veeam do a great SCP tool. Unfortunately, for 5.5 you have to get install the full suite of their free backup product to get it.

###########
Aha, Ninja'd. CLI is always a bit daunting when you're not used to it, the tool veeam provides is excellent and I use it myself for work and can't recommend it enough.
Just a shame it's no longer a standalone tool like it was for 5.1
 
Last edited:
cp: read error: Input/output error
Craps out 163GB into the transfer by the look of it, and the fact its a Read error, not a Write error makes me think its the WD not the Seagate thats having the issue.

I'll see how copying the 3rd WD contents goes.

As long as 2 out of 3 copy ok, I can rebuild - these datastores are used by a Nas4Free VM running a ZFS, If I get an error during the 3rd one too, I'll power up the VM, and hoover all the files out the slow way and rebuild from scratch.
 
So reading between the lines, you've got a VM with 3 disks, 1 on each datastore and you're using NAS4Free to RAID5 them into a single volume?

I did consider doing just that for my setup, but quickly ruled it out and bought a hardware RAID card instead.

If so, rather than doing a copy, try using the vmkfstools clone option instead. I'm not certain the result will be any different, but it's probably worth a go.
 
Exactly that. I wanted to play with VMware and sort out my media storage at the same time. Really I should have done one or the other.

As it is, disks 1 and 3 have copied just fine. So I can rebuild the array inside Nas4Free from the 2 that copied ok, and keep the old 3 disks as 'backup' until I'm happy.

I had a 3Ware card I was going to use, but it doesn't support greater than 2TB - so that made that useless for me. I may pickup a newer card from the bay which would remove the need to have virtual disks attached to the VMs.
 
Whipped the old drives out. Replaced them with the 3 new ones.
Booted up the NAS on the VM..

A bit of google, one ZFS command later
Code: 
  pool: Pool1
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
	continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
  scan: resilver in progress since Fri Sep 19 21:31:20 2014
        10.3G scanned out of 2.18T at 57.2M/s, 11h2m to go
        3.44G resilvered, 0.46% done
config:

	NAME                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	Pool1                       DEGRADED     0     0     0
	  raidz1-0                  DEGRADED     0     0     0
	    da1                     ONLINE       0     0     0
	    replacing-1             UNAVAIL      0     0     0
	      14600323438359508145  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  was /dev/da2/old
	      da2                   ONLINE       0     0     0  (resilvering)
	    da3                     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
Looks like my crazy plan is working. Guess its time for bed..
 
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