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ICH9R software monitor for windows?

ViviTheMage

ViviTheMage

Lifer
This is a continuation from this thread :

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2036271

I've got it all set up. raid 0 for the OS with 2 1TB HDD's, and a 4 disk raid 5....works pretty quick.

But I still want something to monitor raid health. The motherboard uses ICH9R chipset for the raid, the Intel Matrix detects the drives.

running Windows Server 2008 R2

I just want a piece of software that can alert me for issues, read/write errors, etc, kind of like nagios does, or most, decent hardware raid software does.

I am a little bummed I had to split it up and put the OS on a raid 0, but server 2008 won't go on an array/partition larger then 2TB....so i'm kind of stuck with a raid 0 + raid 5 setup.
 
I want something somewhat gui related, that will alert me when something happens..I can't go through the logs every few days, painful.
 
The Intel Matrix Raid Manager, does support alerting, but the alerts come to the desktop. You will see a bubble pop up that says there was an error. I don't think that there is an email option for this or anything really granular. I'm sure that there are programs out there to monitor your event manager and forward specific events, but I haven't researched it.
 
hrmmm, i've been looking..I couldn't find anything actually.

I noticed it pops up a little bubble..degraded drive, that sort of thing. I guess i'll just have to pop on once in a while.

Is there anyway to test the drives specifically? SEAGATE TOOLS don't work, because windows only detects the array, obviously!
 
If you want to be able to analyze and monitor drives directly and do it for no money, the best way would be to start over and use Windows software RAID. That allows the drives to be controlled directly by Windows, you can read SMART values, and can run things like disk diagnostics utilities.

RAID management is then done under Disk Management in Windows. It'll tell you the status of the RAID array. As I'd mentioned in the earlier thread, you can find scripts that will monitor the Windows Event Logs for certain events and will send a notification email. There's also software (both free and paid) that'll monitor Windows Event Logs.

If you are seeing "Degraded" notifications, it's likely from the RAID 5 array because a RAID 0 array will simply die if it's "degraded". With RAID 1 or RAID 5, I've seen cases where one of the drives had timing issues and the RAID controller would decide it wasn't responding properly and drop it from the array (making a degraded array) until it had a chance to rebuild the array and start over. Problems like that normally require a replacement disk, because the disk is not going to "get better". It'll keep happening.
 
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gotcha. I would rebuild it, and let windows server 08 control the raid, but it's all setup, and built properly now using the onboard raid. 6 disks, raid 5.

I think i'll just have to log onto the machine once in a while, and see how the health is of it. I usually do a few times a week, to check certain apps, so i'll just add that to my list of checks.

If my only option is that intel matrix storage manager, then so be it...at least without having to rebuild it all over.
 
there are apps that check your event logs for various levels of errors. to me it is important to see all ERRORS in SYSTEM; as a good clean healthy box should not have any. ever. if you have many boxes iirc there is a free network app that will push them to a central server to review so you can keep an eye ball on all your pc's at home,work,etc.
 
nono, this is a personal raid setup, I don't want to mix it with anything else, haha. I was hoping there was something simple to install on the server 2008 box to handle errors, and send out emails.
 
If it logs to event view, and you have an smtp server for e-mail alerting available, you can write a vbs script scheduled to run every night to scour the event viewer for warnings/errors and alert you that way.
 
well windows has the system to monitor the server(s) already. gfi makes a product. snare has a nice free product. probably want something proactive than a passive monitor as an error on the system level is probably not something that is just going to go away.
 
ViviTheMage said:
If there's an error, I just want an email, so I can test the drives, and swap the bad one.

Any links to said software?
Click to expand...
"Frends Radon" is linked in the Wikipedia article on the Windows Event Viewer:

http://frends.com/products/frends-radon/
"FRENDS Radon is an alerting tool monitoring Windows Server event logs and sending error notifications to e-mail recipients based on pre-defined filtering policies.

FRENDS Radon is a tool that emails reports from Windows application event log.
•Stand-alone version free!
•SMTP configuration
•Event log filter configuration (entry types, error levels, source, eventId, etc)

◦Complex filters with AND, OR, NOT, less/greater or string equals operations
•Time based filter configuration
•FRENDS Iron capability allowing more versatile scheduling and parametrization"

Note: I have NEVER used this software, nor read any reviews.
 
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Wouldn't I need to have windows build the array if I wanted to use that? I don't think it will be sending errors to event view with the RAID setup onboard?
 
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