Thursday, January 29, 2015

install and monitoring Dell PowerVault MD Series Storage Array Resource on ubuntu debian linux

I cannot renounce to use my ubuntu machine even in the data center so today after the Dell technicians told me to convert to at least a windows VM I took few min to check what was wrong with ubuntu and their SMclient and several other softwares.

We got some powervaults and some MD storage. To configure them you need to install the management software.  Like always the software is only supported on Windows, Redhat Enterprise Linux or Suse enterprise Linux.  The management software is in fact written in Java.

After running the DELL installer you'll find a partial installation caused by their rpm-only packaging so I decided to use alien and check if everything was compatible with my ubuntu laptop

Here the steps needed in a nutshell to make the software work on debian distros:
  • Download the cdrom with the powervault software from the Dell support site.
  • Mount the iso file
    mount -o loop Dell_MDxx.iso /mnt
  • Copy 'linux/mdsm/SMIA-LINUXX64.bin' to the machine where you will build your Debian packages.
  • Execute the bin file.
  •  chmod +x ./SMIA-LINUXX64.bin 
  • ./SMIA-LINUX.bin -i console
    Note that, if you are on a remote machine and if you enabled X forwarding when you did the SSH the installer will start a graphical installer, even with the '-i' option...
  • Answer the questions, but don't install in the default location. E.g. choose '/opt/dell_installer/mdstoragemanager'.  Also install the full bundle: Typical (Full Installation) installation
  • In '/opt/dell_installer/mdstoragemanager’ you will find several rpm files: SMagent.rpm, SMclient.rpm, SMruntime.rpm, SMutil.rpm.
  • install Alien rpm converter + apt-get install x11-utils xauth
  • Use alien to unpack the rpm packages. SMclient.rpm is an architecture independent rpm. Because some of the package are 32bit and I'm running on a 64 bit system I can't directly convert to a deb package.  Also, the files in the rpms have some problems we need to fix them before creating the deb package.
  • Conversion of SMclient.rpm to debian package using sed commands to change the package name to 'package-dell' (this is just to avoid clash in case we will use IBM software as well).  The software also uses 'source < file>' wich will not work on Debian. The scripts say they are using '/bin/sh'.  We also would need to install the 32bit java of sun because the jar files in Smutil and SMagent depend on 32bit java.  
NOTE If you only install SMclient you can get away with 'openjdk-6-jre'.  

alien -g SMclient.rpm
cd SMclient-10.75.G6.16
echo "BASEDIR=/opt/dell/mdstoragemanager" > /var/opt/SM/LAUNCHER_ENV
sed -i 's,sh,bash,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMclient
sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMclient opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMcli opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMmonitor
(optional) sed -i 's,smclient$,smclient-dell,' debian/control
sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: x11-utils, xauth|' debian/control
(optional) sed -i 's,^smclient,smclient-dell,' debian/changelog
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/<java version>/jre opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/jre
dpkg-buildpackage -b

  • Conversion of SMutil.rpm to debian package
alien -g SMutil.rpm
cd SMutil-10.01.A6.04
sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/util/SMdevices
sed -i 's,smutil$,smutil-dell,' debian/control
sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: ia32-sun-java6-bin|' debian/control
sed -i 's,^smutil,smutil-dell,' debian/changelog
sed -i 's,^Architecture: i386,Architecture: amd64,' debian/control

  • Conversion of SMagent.rpm to debian package
    alien -g SMagent.rpm
    cd SMagent-10.02.A6.09
    sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/agent/SMagent
    sed -i 's,smagent$,smagent-dell,' debian/control
    sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: ia32-sun-java6-bin|' debian/control
    sed -i 's,^smagent,smagent-dell,' debian/changelog
    sed -i 's,^Architecture: i386,Architecture: amd64,' debian/control
    dpkg-buildpackage -b

When you've built the deb package you can just install them with dpkg -i.  To start Smclient do the following

 /opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMclient

based on http://ed.zehome.com/blog/baie-de-disque-dell-md3200-sous-debian-gnulinux and http://blog.webworm.org/
thanks 

enjoy the DELL mon on debian
 Alex Barchiesi

5 comments:

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  3. I was trying to convert a rpm package and I got this error:

    error: db5 error(-30969) from dbenv->open: BDB0091 DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
    error: cannot open Packages index using db5 - (-30969)
    ....

    To get rid of the error, run the following command to install RPM DB:

    sudo rpm --rebuilddb

    Alex


    ReplyDelete
  4. recently I noticed that there is no more need to use java 32bit

    ReplyDelete
  5. Does the manger need to be installed on the server which is connected to the DAS; moreover, can I get to the DAS via IP?

    ReplyDelete