Today I was alerted by vCenter with a yellow, “Host Storage Status” alarm.

Clicking the ESXi host in the alert I find from the description that I can check the Hardware Status tab of the host for more details

I see that the disk is failing and that RAID is in “Interim Recovery”.  This doesn’t give me much information about the failing disk though.  Maybe in HP ILO I can find more information?  Nope, ILO doesn’t seem to have any information about the disks in the host.  According to the ILO System Information, everything looks just fine.

I called to open a ticket with HP and while on the phone the support technician mentioned a diagnostic tool called HPACUCLI.  If you installed your host a HP customized ESXi image, then this should be there for you.

SSH into your host then type cd opt\hp\hpacucli\bin.  If you type ls you should see the script called “hpacucli”.  Type ./hpacucli and then press “Enter”.  You should see something about detecting controllers and you should be at a new prompt.

Type controller all diag file=/tmp/adu1.zip and then press “Enter”.

Now you will need a program like WinSCP that will get the newly created zip file off the host.  Connect to the host with WinSCP and then navigate to the /tmp folder.  Click on the adu1.zip file and the click “Download”.

Looking into the zip file we see four files; double click on “ADUReport.htm”.  The report should open into your browser and should have a lot of information.  Towards the top of my report I see that the drive has failed and if I scroll down I can actually get some in depth information about the drive.  Things like the model and Serial.