Event Logging for RAID fault in 2008 R2

raidwindows-event-logwindows-server-2008-r2

does anyone have a solution for logging an error/critical entry to the event log in 2008 R2 when RAID has an issue? I really want to set up email alerts for when this happens. I'm using the MS builtin software RAID, not hardware RAID.

There's a thread here that beggars belief.. an MS rep states

"it won't be a significant improvement for the user to notice the degraded array"

so it sounds like they don't ever intend to support it. Has anyone got a solution for this?

Best Answer

This is indeed quite surprising, leave it Microsoft to make a feature worse. In some ways this is not a surprise.

I believe that you can "monitor" the status of the RAID using the diskpart utility. For some example commands see http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Creating_and_Managing_Windows_Server_2008_Mirrored_%28RAID_1%29_Volumes.

I don't have a 2008 software raid myself unfortunately, but I can only imagine that the output of list volume will indicate when a drive is offline or in a faulty state. An example output of list volume looks like this

Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
Volume 0     E   DATA         NTFS   Simple       931 GB  Healthy
Volume 1     D                       DVD-ROM         0 B  No Media
Volume 2         System Rese  NTFS   Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System
Volume 3     C   BOOT         NTFS   Partition    138 GB  Healthy    Boot
Volume 4     F   FreeAgent G  NTFS   Partition   1863 GB  Healthy

You simply create an text file with the content being

list volume

and then run it like

diskpart /s file.txt

You could then pipe the output to a file and parse it with a script, and generate an email or event log entry. You would need to run this script every X minutes, e.g. with the task scheduler.

You could use EventSentry (free version available) and its application scheduler to execute this script, and generate an event/email, but you would still have parse the output from diskpart to determine whether there is a problem or not.

Edit: The status of a failed RAID in Windows is "Failed Rd" opposed to "Healthy". As such, searching for "Failed Rd" should work. Example:

Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
Volume 0     C   BOOT         NTFS   Mirror       931 GB  Failed Rd  Boot

I'll do some experimenting with this in the future to come up with a better answer and write a blog entry, I had no idea that Microsoft dropped the ball on this.

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