ESX servers spread like wildfire in many environments these days. The same is happening over here. So I have to monitor ESX4 servers which are based on single HP DL380 G5 servers booting from USB stick and using the internal HDDs as storage for the virtual machines. The systems are using the internal P400 raid controller. A major failure on such a system would bring down a couple of systems. So it is essential to monitor the health of those systems in detail.

In the past when the VMWare ESX3 was used on the servers it was not possible to gather the health of the storage (HDDs, raid controller, logical discs). This seemed to be a problem of the included software (drivers) since it was possible to monitor such things on other vendors hardware.

With ESX4 the long-needed information are provided by the systems. It is possible to fetch the storage health information using the VI Perl Toolkit. So I wrote a small Nagios Plugin for checking the health of the storage system. I GPL’ed it and named it check_esx4_storage.pl.