LSI Fusion MPT SAS

1. Card information

The FusionMPT SAS is a low-end card from LSI.
It only supports RAID0 and RAID1 an can usually be found in many 1U rackmount servers which have only two disks drives.
Even it's not full of features theses card appear to work fine and are supported by an opensource Linux driver.
An opensource monitoring software exists, however there is no known management tool, even proprietary.

2. Linux kernel drivers

Driver	Supported cards
mptsas	LSI FusionMPT SAS cards
mptctl	Driver to handle monitoring IOCTLs

There are many more mpt* drivers in Linux kernel.
Somes seems to be required dependencies. Others looks like being real driver but we haven't used them yet.

mptsas has been part of the mainstream Linux kernel for a while and should be available in all current Linux distributions.

Some lspci -nn' output examples:

• 02:08.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS ![1000:0054] (rev 01)
• 07:00.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068E PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS ![1000:0058] (rev 08)

3. Management and reporting tools

There are no management tool. LSI doesn't provide any proprietary utility for FusionMPT's cards.
However an opensource reporting tool named mpt-status has been developped.

3.1. mpt-status

3.1.1. Quickstart and output example

Probe controllers IDs:

server:~# mpt-status -p
Checking for SCSI ID:0
Found SCSI id=0, use ''mpt-status -i 0`` to get more information.

Get status of controller "0":

server:~# mpt-status -i 0
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 73 GB, state OPTIMAL, flags ENABLED
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 32 ATA      ST3808110AS      J   , 74 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 1 ATA      ST3808110AS      J   , 74 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE

In most case, your controller ID will be 0. Running mpt-status without any parameters will give you the same output example as above.

You MUST have mptctl kernel module loaded to monitor your RAID HBAs.
Load it by hand for the first time and add it to /etc/modules for next reboots:

modprobe mptctl
echo mptctl >> /etc/modules

3.1.2. My opinion about mpt-status

Despite it seems that no real upstream development exists for this tool, it works fine and is reliable.
We experienced several disks failure on MPT SAS controllers and mpt-status always reported the failure and status changes.
However don't expected verbose output.

3.1.3. Reporting with mpt-status

mpt-status has been greatly integrated to Debian by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steffen Joeris.
Many thanks to them for good work !

The packages comes with an initscript that periodic run mpt-status to check status.
It keeps a file with latest status and thus is able to detect RAID status changes and/or brokeness.
It will log a ligne to syslog when something failed and will send you a mail.
Until arrays are healthy again a reminder will be sent each 2 hours.

In fact, I must admit all my "something-status" packages for others kind of cards are based on this work.