Recently, one of our customers asked us to upgrade their server hardware. Unfortunately, they can't update their software and we had to install Centos 6 with new NVMe drives. But, we need to monitor them and by default SmartMontools does not support NVMe on CentOS 6.X. Also, you can read about how to install SmartMontools in the post below:
There are 2 solutions to how you can monitor this way.
- nvme-cli – This program is a user-space utility to provide standards-compliant tooling for NVM Express drives.
- Upgrade SmartMonTool to the latest version.
Let's check both this method:
NVMe-CLI installation
This tool is not present on the standard Centos 6 repository. So, we had to build it from source using the command:
# cd /tmp # wget # tar zxf v1.11.1.tar.gz # cd nvme-cli-1.11.1 # make # make -s install
You can now check the NVMe drive status with the following command:
# nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0
Upgrade SmartMontools
The CentOS 6 repositories do not have a SmartMontools version that has NVMe support. So, we also have to build:
# wget # tar -zxf smartmontools-6.6.tar.gz # cd smartmontools-6.6 # ./configure --without-cxx11-option --with-nvme-devicescan=yes # make # make -s install
After that, you can monitor your NVMe with SmartCtl.
