Dell PowerEdge – How to Swap Entire Disk Set Between Servers

ESXi on fully supported hardware from any of the major vendors will generate RAID controller alerts visible in the VI CLient. Since the H700 on the HCL I'd be very surprised if it didn't provide alerts, the older PERC6 cards definitely do, sometimes to the point of being annoying. It would be nice if VMware (or anyone else) would provide a definitive list of what level of fault reporting their built in hardware health monitoring can actually provide for each device but that's not something I've ever been able to find.

This would be a lot easier to figure out if ESXi supported SNMP but it doesn't unfortunately, you have to use WBEM\CIM which is not quite as easy to enable and interact with. The Nagios\Python script referenced in my answer to this related question might give you some better information if you can get it working.

Dell have a reasonably useful document here on the various steps you can take to enable more advanced monitoring through the Open Manage Server Administrator agent on ESX & ESXi V4\4.1 that you can work through if you want to fully enable remote monitoring on your ESXi hosts. Even with this you are limited to CIM\WBEM and SNMP traps, SNMP queries don't work on ESXi.

Hopefully you should be able to reuse your drive trays but remove them and check they have two sets of 4 holes, one for SATA and one for SAS.

If you have the trays that only have holes for SAS you will either need to purchase the interposer cards or different trays. (E.g. to use tray CC852 with SATA you will need interposer PN939, or if you have tray F9541 (I believe also NF467/H9122/G9146/D981C) then no interposers needed).

The SAS backplane and SAS controller will work fine with regular SATA drives. No need for interposer cards for signalling - these help if you have SAS and SATA on the same backplane as the higher voltage SAS signals may not get along with lower voltage SATA).

You've picked 2Tb drives which is the limit of the PERC 5/6. The only issue remaining is whether to purchase Dell drives or not. Dell drives cost a lot more than non Dell drives. The only real difference is that a Dell drive has Dell optimised firmware, and (check with your account manager) Dell should support RAID issues with Dell supplied drives while they may point the finger at your 3rd party drives or even refuse to help.

I've managed to flash a batch of non Dell SAS drives to Dell firmware recently but this may vary from model to model (and possibly even dependant on the firmware the drive comes with). I've only done this for my peace of mind regarding stability rather than to try and trick Dell regarding support though.