Running IBM DSA on ESXi Servers

I'm in the process of troubleshooting what we believe to be flat disk controller batteries in a number of our IBM blade servers, as part of this process IBM support have asked us to supply the logs from BladeCenter and also the individual blade.

There's several ways of doing this, one way is to boot from the DSA .ISO (here), another is to download the DSA portable executable and run it from your workstation and let it interrogate the ESXi server remotely.

1. Enable 'Remote Tech Support Mode' on your ESXi server via the Console. (System Customization > Troubleshooting Options > Enable Remote Tech Support (SSH)
2. Download the portable version for your OS (I used ibm_utl_dsa_dsyt85t-3.40_portable_windows_i386.exe)
3. Run DSA with the following arguments

   ibm_utl_dsa_dsyt85t-3.40_portable_windows_x86-64.exe --vmware-esxi user:password@ip-address

   'user' being the username (normally root), 'password' being the password associated with the account and the 'ip-address' being of that of the ESXi Host.