This is something which took me quite a while to figure out, but it can be done fairly easily in a few minutes. This guide will install Dell OMSA and use omreport to view the status of the RAID.

First, add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

Then, if you try ‘apt-get update’, you will get a key error, so do the following:

wget -O – http://ftp.sara.nl/debian_sara.asc | apt-key add  -
apt-get update
apt-get install dellomsa

To use omreport, you need to install libstdc++5 to fix the dependancy problems:

For 32 bit systems:
cd /tmp/
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb

For 64 bit systems (you will need the 32 bit version as well):
cd /tmp/
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gcc-3.3/libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb -x libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb ./extracts
cp ./extracts/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/
rm -rf ./extracts

Now start the dataeng service:

/etc/init.d/dataeng start

And you should be able to view information about the RAID using omreport:

omreport system summary
omreport storage connector controller=0
omreport storage pdisk controller=0
omreport storage vdisk controller=0

You can then make a simple shell/php/perl script cron which checks the status of the RAID every x minutes and notifies you of any problems.