Configuring alerts with MegaRAID Storage Manager for LSI 9260-4i controller onESXi 5.0

This was a pain. If indeed the LSI 3ware 9750-xi is supported (and although not listed i believe it does work with ESXi 5), i STRONGLY recommend using that controller with 3dm2 vs this MegaRAID godzilla of the deep.
UPDATE: As of this writing, 9750 drivers are not supported on out-of-the-box ESXi 5.0 update 1, but they are available (currently listed under 9650SE driver on the lsi 9750 page) and need to be compiled into the ESXi installer. See ‘Customizing Installation Images’; good luck and let me know how it goes!

installed the 2 vib files into the ESXi host (after enabling ssh etc)
Turned on CIM server here: Configuration->Security Profile->Services->Properties
and opened the firewall for CIM Server and CIM Secure Server.

This post has some good information about how to do this. Especially the firewall process in this post was necessary: follow the instructions about opening the firewall ports by creating the file called LSI_MSM.xml in /etc/firewall
added an entry in rc.local to restore that firewall setting like this:
# set up firewall access for MegaRAID Storage Manager
/usr/bin/cp /vmfs/volumes/datastore2/LSI_MSM.xml /etc/vmware/firewall/
esxcli network firewall refresh

This article at the bottom was helpful for getting started http://tinkertry.com/lsi92658iesxi5/

finding the right MSM program at LSI’s website is tricky. First I downloaded version 9 but the option to connect to remote servers was grayed out. So I tried version 12 and it worked!

UPDATE: I set up the alerts and decided to test it by pulling out a drive.
A) I did not get an email alert, despite the “Test” working immediately beforehand
B) the server is beeping very loudly, even after putting the drive back in.
C) After putting the drive back in, it showed up as ‘Unconfigured Bad’ in the MSM
D) I chose the option to set it to ‘Unconfigured Good’ but nothing happened
E) I rebooted the host, the beeping started up again on boot.
F) I could not connect the MSM to the server after this reboot. I had to shut down again to look in the web bios utility.
G) After booting again, beeping persisted. The web bios says “Rebuild” next to this drive

Is it rebuilding? How long will it take for a 2TB drive with no data? Why can’t MSM connect to the server in the meanwhile?
I’ve confirmed the ESXi firewall is good with
esxcli network firewall ruleset rule list | grep LSI_MSM

UPDATE: I found (thanks to this post) that CIM Server didn’t start as it should have. Go in manually under Configuration->Security Profile->Services->Properties and start it.

MSM still wouldn’t connect when I configured it with the host’s distinct ip address in the favorite list. So I tried letting it search the local network and it found the server!
It shows the drive rebuilding progress, 20% with 2 hr 52 min left to go. I hope the beeping stops after that!

And this guy (just yesterday) explains why we’re having trouble finding our server with MSM and a fix.

So now my questions are;
i) why didn’t the email alert get sent when a drive was pulled, even though the test worked?
ii) how do i acknowledge the failure to stop the beeping?
iii) Why doesn’t CIM server start with ESXi as it is configured to do?

Well I don’t know if it’s the right answer to (ii) but this stopped the beeping:
MegaCli -AdpSetProp -AlarmSilence -aALL

Of course first I had to get MegaCLI working on this box.

UPDATE: Seeing how well MegaCLI works, I have a plan to use that for RAID monitoring that will be more reliable than this MSM alert setup. It won’t rely on CIM server and it won’t rely on MSM’s alerts and so addresses (i) and (iii)