Notice the “Status” column, which indicates that our “BOOT” volume is feeling dandy right now. Volume 2 D System Rese NTFS Simple 100 MB Healthy Volume 1 C NTFS Mirror 141 GB Healthy Boot Volume 0 System Rese NTFS Simple 100 MB Healthy System Volume # Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info If you just run diskpart and execute the “list volume” command, you will see output similar to this: An event log filter looks for a 10200 error event, possibly looking at the event message as well (for custom routing).ĭiskpart’s output is pretty straightforward.When a problem is detected, EventSentry logs an error event 10200 to the application event log, including output from step 1.EventSentry runs our VBScript (which in turn runs diskpart) and captures the output.So how can we turn diskpart’s output into an email (or other) alert? Simple: We use EventSentry‘s application scheduler to run diskpart.exe on a regular basis (and since the tool doesn’t stress the system it can be run as often as every minute) and generate an alert. Since we’re interested as to whether a particular RAID-enabled logical drive is “Healthy”, we’ll be looking at logical drives.
RAID ALERT SOFTWARE
With a few small steps we’ll be able to log an event to the event log when a drive in a software RAID fails, and send an alert via email or other notification methods.ĭiskpart is pretty much the command-line interface to the Disk Management MMC snap-in, which allows you to everything the MMC snap-in does – and much more! One of the things you can do with the tool is to review the status of all (logical) drives. What gives?Įven though a discussion on why that is (or is not) seems justified, I will focus on the solution instead.įortunately, there is a way to be notified when a RAID is “broken”, thanks in part to the diskpart.exe tool (which is part of Windows) and EventSentry.
RAID ALERT WINDOWS
What’s peculiar is that this is a step back from Windows 2003, where RAID problems were actually logged to the System event log with the dmboot and dmio event sources. tray), and even WMI is silent as a grave. The event logs are quiet, there are no notifications (e.g. If the RAID is in a degraded state (usually because a hard disk is dead) then you will not know unless you navigate to the Disk Management view. Unfortunately, despite all the positive things about software RAID, there is a major pitfall on Windows 2008: The OS will not tell you when the RAID has failed. Better monitoring capabilities (though this article will alleviate this somewhat)īut despite being far from perfect, software RAIDs do have their time and place.
Since this article is starting to sound like a software raid promotion, and for the sake of completeness, I am listing SOME of the advantages of a hardware RAID here as well:
Windows Server lets you do all this, and it’s included with the OS – so why not take advantage of it? The last point is often overlooked I think – you can literally just add a hard disk to any non-redundant Windows server and create a mirror – with less than dozen clicks! When you need to add redundancy to a server without reinstalling the OS or restoring from backup.When you need to enable redundancy on a server that wasn’t originally designed with redundancy in mind (as if that would ever happen!).When you are on a budget and don’t want to spend a few hundred $$ on a hardware RAID controller.Software RAIDs make sense in a variety of scenarios: Software RAIDs are not as powerful and fast as their hardware counterparts, but are nevertheless a good way to enable disk redundancy. If you are already using Windows Server 2008’s software RAID capabilities, and think that Windows will somehow notify you when a disk in an array fails, then you can skip to “Just say something!” below.Ĭreating a RAID can all be done from Disk Management view in the Computer Management console, without any scripting or command-line tools. Windows Server has long provided admins the ability to create a software RAID, enabling redundant disks without a (potentially expensive) hardware RAID controller.
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