Monitoring ESXi Physical Disk Failures in DX UIM

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

Users may notice that DX UIM (Nimsoft) does not provide native visibility into ESXi host physical hardware faults (such as physical disk failures on Dell PowerEdge hardware) through the standard vmware probe or ESXi SNMP traps.

Environment

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM)
• vmware probe (all versions)
• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x and 8.x
• Physical Hardware: Dell PowerEdge servers with iDRAC

Cause

1. Product Design: The DX UIM vmware probe is designed to monitor virtualization-level metrics via the VMware API. It does not have direct access to the underlying physical RAID controllers or disk hardware.
2. ESXi Limitation: Native SNMP traps in ESXi 7.x/8.x are restricted to Memory, Power Supply, Fan, and CPU events. Disk-related hardware traps are deprecated at the host level.

Resolution

To achieve visibility into physical disk failures, a hardware-level monitoring strategy must be implemented:

1. Direct iDRAC Monitoring (Recommended):

   • Configure the server's hardware management interface (e.g., Dell iDRAC) to send SNMP traps directly to the DX UIM snmptd (SNMP Trap Daemon) probe.
   • Alternatively, use the snmpcollector probe to poll the hardware vendor's MIBs directly via the iDRAC IP address.

2. Enable Virtualization Indicators in vmware probe:
   While the probe cannot see the physical disk, it can monitor host-level storage performance indicators that often precede or accompany a disk failure. In the vmware probe configuration, enable the following metrics under the HOST_DISK section:

   • QOS_VMWARE_HOST_DISK_BUS_RESETS
   • QOS_VMWARE_HOST_DISK_COMMANDS_ABORTED