How To Monitor SSD Health Status on VMware ESXi Host

With more SSD drives added into the VMware host, I need to find a way to monitor the health status of these drives before it’s too late. Here is what I gathered so far:

First of all, enable SSH service so you can tune in through SSH to perform the commands.

To get the list of storage devices installed on the host, run

esxcli storage core device list

Find the one that has Is SSD: true and mark down the device ID for the next step.

esxcli storage core device smart get -d=deviceID

The output will look something like this. Mine says all N/A so there could be something still missing.

You can archive the same results for all disks in once by running a script called smartinfo.sh in the following folder:

/usr/lib/vmware/vm-support/bin

If you are satisfied with the information provided by this builtin command, great. Otherwise, you may want to try a modified copy of smartmontools for VMware, thanks to this vExpert.

Here is a step of how to get the tool installed on VMware host.

1. Download smartctl-6.6-4321.x86_64.vib.
2. Upload it to the /tmp folder of the ESXi host.
3. SSH to the host.
4. Set the ViB acceptance level to CommunitySupported.
5. Then install the package.

esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/smartctl-6.6-4321.x86_64.vib

The tool is installed at /opt/smartmontools folder and works just like the Linux version.

/opt/smartmontools/smartctl -d sat --all /dev/disks/[DISK]