Paravirtualized Disks not showing SMART info in Rockstor

General
1

Hi there! Currently on v3.8.16-16, been trying to get Rockstor set up on top of an Ubuntu KVM vm.

I’ve paravirtualized 2 8TB harddrives and they don’t seem to have S.M.A.R.T info showing in Rockstor. Anybody have any experience with this or can point me in the right direction to get this fixed?

Disks.PNG1778×235 25.7 KB

Here’s my current KVM .xml info:

<disk type='block' device='disk'>
  <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
  <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD80EFZX-68UW8N0_VK1A2L7Y'/>
  <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
  <serial>VK1A2L7Y</serial>
  <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/>
</disk>
<disk type='block' device='disk'>
  <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
  <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD80EFZX-68UW8N0_R6G67N3Y'/>
  <target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/>
  <serial>R6G67N3Y</serial>
  <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/>
</disk>
2

@siukwai Welcome to the Rockstor community forum. I think this one might simply be down to the virtio layer not supporting S.M.A.R.T., that at least is my reckoning from a little research and so Rockstor as a result disables S.M.A.R.T when it see a virtio device to avoid excessively logging failure attempts at retrieving such info. If you could demonstrate that the S.M.A.R.T info is accessible from these drives when mapped in this way then we should re-address this. Have you had any success on the command line with getting smartctl to put out anything useful: ie what is the result of executing the following?

smartctl -a /dev/disk/by-id/virtio-R6G67N3Y

I’m fairly sure that the virtio layer just doesn’t do S.M.A.R.T. so if this was a thing you needed then you would have to pass the devices through to the Rockstor system in a more direct (and less abstract/virtual) fashion than virtio provides. After all your drives could just as easily be files as far as virtio is concerned.

From a virtio device within KVM here I get:

smartctl -a /dev/disk/by-id/virtio-serial-6 
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-4.10.6-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

/dev/disk/by-id/virtio-serial-6: Unable to detect device type
Please specify device type with the -d option.

Use smartctl -h to get a usage summary

However that drive is just file backed.

Hope that helps.

3

Ah gotcha, that makes a lot of sense. Would I be better off trying to pass through the whole eSata controller to get smart monitoring and decent performance?

4

@siukwai

I don’t really know as I haven’t done any hardware passthrough of that type so can’t really comment; but hopefully others here can chip in who have done such things. I suspect it will also depend on the newness of your Ubuntu install? What version of Ubuntu and KVM are you doing this all on?

5

Right now Ubuntu is on 16.04, but I’m not tied to any specific distro or version, just trying to set up a home cloud that fits my needs (VM’s and a expandable NAS). There’s very sparse info on passing through the whole controller searching on google, though I can’t imagine I’m the only one to try this. Thanks for all the help so far.

It looks like more people here use proxmox. Anybody have any experience with passing through the controller with it?