Greetings,
Not so far ago, I've faced a problem of accessing and managing multiple
hardware RAIDs in Linux. That is, there are multiple servers with
various controllers that I need to:
1. Manage RAID arrays (create / change attributes / delete / add
physical discs, etc)
2. Monitor these arrays
Given that I wasn't dealing with RAIDs before (started about a year
ago), it came to great surprise to me that hardware RAIDs lack any
standardization at all. Generally, only thing they're supposed to do is
providing SCSI discs and there's absolutely no way to know what this
logical disc consists of, create it, monitor it, etc, without
proprietary controller utilities supplied by a vendor. These utilities
are generally a mess: each one has it's own interface, switches, CLI
language, etc, and even concepts differ (for example, LSI deals with
physical-logical drives, Areca deals with physical-raidsets-volumesets).
After a bit of intricate search, I've only found 2 references to this
problem:
1. Proprietary ManageEngine OpStor product that costs a fortune, is
licensed per-device and doesn't seem to fulfill my needs 100%.
2. OpenBSD's initiative named "bioctl" that generally seems to implement
such a unified management interface, but it development seems to be
stalled. It only supports older versions of LSI MegaRAID controller they
call "ami" and
So, I've came to an idea that I should try to implement such interface
myself. It was implemented as Einarc project, now hosted at
http://www.inquisitor.ru/doc/einarc/
The concept seems to have succeeded and I've already using it in 2
production projects. It works by downloading all these proprietary
controller CLIs and then it just translates calls and data from
proprietary data model to unified one and back, for example:
einarc -t areca adapter info
gets translated into
/usr/local/lib/areca/cli sys info
Sadly, I don't have access to any possible controller at the market and
it only supports a limited number of current hardware controllers
(Areca, older LSI, newer LSI, Adaptec). I'd like to ask several things:
1. Are there any existing implementations of such thing I've missed?
2. Are there any RAID/storage controllers around that don't fit into
Einarc's current object scheme? What needs to be extended/fixed?
3. Anyone needs support for more hardware contollers in Einarc? Would it
be useful?
4. Any known open-source methods to access these hardware controllers
without translating queries to proprietary CLIs? I guess, at least old
MegaRAID queries can be ported from OpenBSD bioctl?
--
WBR, Mikhail Yakshin AKA GreyCat
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