VMware

Installing Avago LSI StorCLI VMware ESXi

Installing Avago LSI StorCLI VMware ESXi allows you to interact with your Avago LSI RAID controller from the command line in VMware ESXi.

Brandon LeeJune 28, 2017Last Updated: February 13, 2024

2 minutes read

In our previous post on how to update Avago SMIS provider in VMware ESXi, we discussed how to upgrade your Avago/LSI SMIS provider that allows you to interact with your Avago/LSI card with the Avago Storage Manager utility. However, may not have installed the Avago/LSI SMIS provider on your VMware ESXi host and you may need visibility into a RAID operation or to silence the alarm on your VMware ESXi host running an Avago/LSI RAID controller. What are your options here? Do you have to schedule a maintenance period to shutdown your VMs (if standalone host, lab environment, etc), install the vib, and reboot? Thankfully, there is another utility that can come in handy in these cases when you need to interact with your Avago/LSI RAID controller and you can’t schedule a maintenance period. For these situations, we can use Avago LSI StorCLI, so let’s look at Installing Avago LSI StorCLI VMware ESXi.

Installing Avago LSI StorCLI VMware ESXi

Similar to installing the Avago/LSI SMIS provider, the process to install the StorCLI is straightforward and simply includes copying the .vib file to the ESXi host and then installing using the esxcli software vib install -v command pointed to the .vib. The nice difference in installing StorCLI from installing the SMIS provider is that the StorCLI does not require a reboot.

After installation, we need to change our working directory to /opt/lsi/storcli where we can then run the storcli command. Below we are running the storecli show command.

Silence Alarm Avago LSI StorCLI

If you are not able or have not installed the SMIS provider, you can using the StorCLI, silence an alarm that is sounding due to a failure of a drive, etc. To silence the alarm, we enter the controller number and the corresponding command for interacting with the alarm:

./storcli /c0 set alarm=silence
./storcli /c0 set alarm=disable
./storcli /c0 set alarm=enable

Avago LSI StorCLI check status of copyback or rebuild operation

To check a copyback operation, we simply enter the command:

./storcli /c0 /eall /sall show copyback

For rebuilds:

./storcli /c0 /eall /sall show rebuild

Avago LSI StorCLI change rebuild rate

To set the rebuild rate of the controller, we can use the following command:

./storcli /c0 set rebuildrate=30

Thoughts

I like the tools that are provided by Avago/LSI to interact with the RAID controllers and affect change to the controller while booted into an operating system. The VMware SMIS provider is a great way to remotely monitor an Avago/LSI system remotely. If you don’t have the luxury of a maintenance period to reboot a host, the StorCLI is a nice alternative to using the Storage Manager application. The StorCLI is all command line driven, however, has most if not all of the functionality of the Storage Manager application. Installing Avago LSI StorCLI VMware ESXi can provide a great alternative to having a maintenance period and needing a reboot to interact with the Avago/LSI RAID controller.