Recently I’ve had to do extensive work with Dell PowerEdge servers, and specifically Dell’s that use the LSI MegaRAID controllers. Anyone who has ever had to work with the LSI RAID controllers knows that the MegaCLI provided by LSI is the most cryptic command line utility in existence. MegaCli is available for Linux, DOS, Windows, Netware and Solaris. You can get it from LSI’s website (search for MegaRAID SAS).
Inside the tarball or zip file you’ll find an RPM archive which contains the MegaCli and MegaCli64 binaries (will be installed to /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli).
Please note:
This emergency cheat sheet is not exhaustive, but it should be sufficient in most cases. For a complete reference either call MegaCli -h or refer to the manual at: http://www.lsi.com/files/docs/techdocs/storage_stand_prod/sas/mr_sas_sw_ug.pdf
While there are a lot of different parameters for MegaCli, some of them are always identical. These are described here in short.
Adapter parameter -aN
The parameter -aN (where N is a number starting with zero or the string ALL) specifies the PERC5/i adapter ID. If you have only one controller it’s safe to use ALL instead of a specific ID, but you’re encouraged to use the ID for everything that makes changes to your RAID configuration.
Physical drive parameter -PhysDrv [E:S]
For commands that operate on one or more pysical drives, the -PhysDrv [E:S] parameter is used, where E is the enclosure device ID in which the drive resides and S the slot number (starting with zero). You can get the enclosure device ID using “MegaCli -EncInfo -aALL”. The E:S syntax is also used for specifying the physical drives when creating a new RAID virtual drive.
Virtual drive parameter -Lx
The parameter -Lx is used for specifying the virtual drive (where x is a number starting with zero or the string all).
Controller information
MegaCli -AdpAllInfo -aALL
MegaCli -CfgDsply -aALL
MegaCli -AdpEventLog -GetEvents -f events.log -aALL && cat events.log
Enclosure information
MegaCli -EncInfo -aALL
Virtual drive information
MegaCli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL
Physical drive information
MegaCli -PDList -aALL
MegaCli -PDInfo -PhysDrv [E:S] -aALL
Battery backup information
MegaCli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL
Controller management
Silence active alarm
MegaCli -AdpSetProp AlarmSilence -aALL
Disable alarm
MegaCli -AdpSetProp AlarmDsbl -aALL
Enable alarm
MegaCli -AdpSetProp AlarmEnbl -aALL
Physical drive management
Set state to offline
MegaCli -PDOffline -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Set state to online
MegaCli -PDOnline -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Mark as missing
MegaCli -PDMarkMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Prepare for removal
MegaCli -PdPrpRmv -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Replace missing drive
MegaCli -PdReplaceMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -ArrayN -rowN -aN
The number N of the array parameter is the Span Reference you get using “MegaCli -CfgDsply -aALL” and the number N of the row parameter is the Physical Disk in that span or array starting with zero (it’s not the physical disk’s slot!).
Rebuild drive
MegaCli -PDRbld -Start -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
MegaCli -PDRbld -Stop -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
MegaCli -PDRbld -ShowProg -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Clear drive
MegaCli -PDClear -Start -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
MegaCli -PDClear -Stop -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
MegaCli -PDClear -ShowProg -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Bad to good (or back to good as I like to call it)
MegaCli -PDMakeGood -PhysDrv[E:S] -aN
This changes drive in state Unconfigured-Bad to Unconfigured-Good.
Walkthrough: Change/replace a drive
Set the drive offline, if it is not already offline due to an error
MegaCli -PDOffline -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Mark the drive as missing
MegaCli -PDMarkMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Prepare drive for removal
MegaCli -PDPrpRmv -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
Change/replace the drive
If you’re using hot spares then the replaced drive should become your new hot spare drive:
MegaCli -PDHSP -Set -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
In case you’re not working with hot spares, you must re-add the new drive to your RAID virtual drive and start the rebuilding
TweetMegaCli -PdReplaceMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -ArrayN -rowN -aN
MegaCli -PDRbld -Start -PhysDrv [E:S] -aN
You are right I’m having a hard time setting the jbod disks spin down when they are not in use. The link with full commands is dead, can you repost a new link?
The row number of a physical drive needed in the command: MegaCli -PdReplaceMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -ArrayN -rowN -aN can be determined using MegaCli –PdGetMissing -aALL
I ran into an issue where there was no enclosure and had to use [:S] instead of [E:S]
=]MARKED AS SPAM BY SLIDE2COMMENT[=
Very nice cheatsheet, helped me a lot recently when I had to replace a faulty drive.
Thanks! This is great!
Instead of
MegaCli -AdpEventLog -GetEvents -f events.log -aALL && cat events.log
how about just using
MegaCli -AdpEventLog -GetEvents -f /dev/stdout -aALL
Great references!!! I found the that the MegaCLI GUI is not working well for us and is flaky. the commands helped us rebuild drive failures on a couple of our hybrid compute/storage arrays. This is part of our standarnd build now and the commands are great to utilize automation. No help from LSI.com website other than downloads. Thanks for spending the time to put this together!!!
Thanks a lot!!! work for me in Linux, great job this page 🙂
[root@DBS1 MegaCli]# pwd
/opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli
[root@DBS1 MegaCli]# rpm -qa |grep Mega
MegaCli-8.07.10-1.noarch
[root@DBS1 MegaCli]# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.1 (Santiago)
[root@DBS1 MegaCli]# uname -a
Linux DBS1 2.6.32-100.34.1.el6uek.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 25 17:46:45 EDT 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@DBS1 MegaCli]# lspci |grep RAID
50:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2108 [Liberator] (rev 05)
Hey guys
what is the command for make the leds on the physical drives to light again , ,cant tell which drive is failing on visual check.
Any way I can visualize what is my RAID arrangement ?
Thanks
Thank you! Really nice 🙂
Thanks Erik! this saved me a lot of time!
Blinking LED’s on linux?
THEORY: (from the manual)
MegaCli –PDLocate –PhysDrv[E0:S0,E1:S1….]
-aN|-a0,1,2|-aALL
will locate drives.
tricky part is, YOU HAVE TO ESCAPE THE BRACKETS IN THE SHELL. fml.
in short: (a0 for adapter, since i assume you only have 1 raid controller)
Start blinking:
MegaCli pdlocate physdrv \[252:0\] a0
Stop blinking:
MegaCli pdlocate stop physdrv \[252:0\] a0
where 252 is the enclosure’s device id, find it out via:
MegaCli encinfo a0
Great reference – thank you for putting this together.
To blink LED:
MegaCli -PdLocate {[-start] | -stop} -physdrv[E0:S0,E1:S1,…] -aN|-a0,1,2|-aALL
Meaning: MegaCli -PdLocate -start -physdrv[“Enclosure Device ID”:”Slot Number”] -“Adapter”
Example: MegaCli -PdLocate -start -physdrv[237:2] -a0
Example: MegaCli -PdLocate -stop -physdrv[237:2] -a0
(Will return something like: Adapter: 0: Device at EnclId-252 SlotId-0 — PD Locate Start Command was successfully sent to Firmware)
I can not even count the number of times I have come back to this page as reference because the official documentation is … well, LSI.
There’s another MegaCli cheat sheet here: http://www.vmwareadmins.com/megacli-working-examples-cheat-sheet/
… with some additional, and extremely useful examples. For example to list info about logical drives (and the status of each VD):
megacli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL
… and if you pipe the output from that through this command:
| egrep “^(Virtual|State|Num)” /tmp/mega-l | sed -e ‘N;N;s/\n/ /g’
… you’ll see a one line summary of each VD, it’s current state, an the number of disks associated with it.
Another is this:
./MegaCLI -CfgLdAdd -r1′ [38:0,38:1]’ -a0
… set up a RAID-1 using drives 0 and 1 from enclosure 38 on adapter zero and
this monster:
./MegaCli -CfgSpanAdd -r50 -Array0[38:0,38:1,38:2,38:3,38:4,38:5] -Array1[38:6,38:7,38:8,38:9,38:10,38:11] Direct RA WB -a0
… set up a RAID-50 (volume spanned across two RAID-5 arrays)
Or this:
./MegaCli -AdpSetProp -EnableJBOD 1 -aALL
… which allegedly works with some MegaRAID adapters (though, perhaps not the ones I’m using in our cloud).
Here’s yet another good cheat sheet with even more commands on it: http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/computing/docs/public/megacli_raid_lsi.html
… but I’m still looking for a command or script that gives a simple tabular summary of every LD … the corresponding Linux /dev/XX name … and the member PDs (or LD Spans) … and the status of each.
We want a simple way to identify the failed or failing drives (in a pseudo-JBOD arrangement) … auto-generate tickets to our DCOps staff … and the be able to scan for the “Unconfigured(Good)” state that show up after the replacement … to automate the re-creation of the LD (megacli -CfgLdAdd -r0′[?:XX]’ -a0 — single volume “RAID-0” in our case) and run our initialization script (parted mklabel … mkpart … mkfs.ext4 and mount, etc).
Great reference – thank you for putting this together.
Thank you very very much! this was really helpful
I am running a Debian server and The Debian Raid Guide was invaluable as was Erik’s cheatsheet
I can’t even count how many times I’ve come back to this page to fix some thing, or just to turn off an alarm from one of my many LSI devices. I should just get it tattooed to my arm. If ever you come to Montreal, I owe you at least a beverage or two.