ESXi S.M.A.R.T. health monitoring for hard drives

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to:

• Help diagnose a local hard drive fault
• Read the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard drive (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology)

Symptoms:

• The server reports a hard drive warning in POST (Power On Self Test)
• Virtual machines cannot power on due to VMFS corruption on local hard drives
• Very poor performance on local hard drives

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

Starting with ESXi 5.1, VMware added S.M.A.R.T. functionality to monitor hard drive health. The S.M.A.R.T. feature records various operation parameters from physical hard drives attached to a local controller. The feature is part of the firmware on the circuit board of a physical hard disk (HDD and SSD).


To read the current data from a disk:
 

1. Open a console or SSH session to the ESXi host. For more information, see Using ESXi Shell in ESXi.
2. Determine the device parameter to use by running the command:
   
   # esxcli storage core device list
    
3. The expected output is a list with all SCSI devices seen by the ESXi host. For example:
   
   t10.ATA_____XXXXX________________________XXXXX
    
4. Read the data from the device where device is a value found in step 3:
   
   # esxcli storage core device smart get -d device
   
   Note: External FC/iSCSI LUNs or virtual disks from a RAID controller might not report a S.M.A.R.T. status.

This table breaks down some example output:
 

Parameter	Value	Threshold	Worst
Health Status	OK	N/A	N/A
Media Wearout Indicator	0	0	0
Write Error Count	N/A	N/A	N/A
Read Error Count	118	50	118
Power-on Hours	0	0	0
Power Cycle Count	100	0	100
Reallocated Sector Count	100	3	100
Raw Read Error Rate	118	50	118
Drive Temperature	27	0	34
Driver Rated Max Temperature	N/A	N/A	N/A
Write Sectors TOT Count	N/A	N/A	N/A
Read Sectors TOT Count	N/A	N/A	N/A
Initial Bad Block Count	N/A	N/A	N/A

Note: A physical hard drive can have up to 30 different attributes (the example above supports only 13). For more information, see How does S.M.A.R.T. function of hard disks Work?

Note: The preceding link was correct as of September 2, 2014. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.


A raw value can have two possible results:

• A number between 0-253
• A word (for example, N/A or OK)

 

Column descriptions

Note: The values returned and their meaning for each of these columns can vary by manufacturer. For more information, please consult your hardware supplier.

• Parameter
  
  This is a translation from the attribute ID to human-readable text. For example:
  
  hex 0xE7 = decimal 231 = "Drive Temperature"
  
  For more information, see the Known ATA S.M.A.R.T. attributes section of the S.M.A.R.T. Wikipedia article.
  
  Note: The preceding link was correct as of September 2, 2014. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.
   
• Value
  
  This is the raw value reported by the disk. To illustrate a simple Value using the example above, the Drive Temperature is reported as 27, which means 27 degrees Celsius.
  
  A Value can either be a number (0-253) or a word (for example, N/A or OK).
   
• Threshold
  
  The (failure) limit for the attribute.
   
• Worst
  
  The highest Value ever recorded for the parameter.

 

smartd daemon

• To check the status of smartd daemon, you can run : /etc/init.d/smartd status

Additional Information

The vm-support bundle also captures S.M.A.R.T. details in the smartinfo.sh.txt file. The file can be found in the commands/ directory.

Configuring advanced options for ESXi
Using ESXi Shell in ESXi