Error retrieving S.M.A.R.T. values on Proxmox for SCSI virtual disk (QEMU_HARDDISK)

[thiagomespb]

Hi everyone,


I'm encountering an issue when trying to view the S.M.A.R.T. values of a virtual disk (/dev/sdb) in Proxmox. When I open the "S.M.A.R.T. Values" window, I get the following error:

Bad Request (400)
command "smartctl" "-H" "-A" "-j" "/dev/sdb" failed - status code: 2 - no error message

The disk is identified as QEMU_HARDDISK and connected via drive-scsi0. It seems to be a virtual disk.


Has anyone experienced this before? Is this due to the fact that it's a virtual disk and S.M.A.R.T. data isn't available? Is there any workaround, or is this an expected limitation?


Thanks in advance!

 

[mgabriel]

Is this due to the fact that it's a virtual disk and S.M.A.R.T. data isn't available?

Yes.

What SMART values would you expect from a virtual device?

 

[thiagomespb]

You're right — I wouldn't expect actual S.M.A.R.T. values from a fully virtualized device like a QEMU virtual disk.


However, the issue is not about missing S.M.A.R.T. data, but rather that the Proxmox GUI throws a 400 Bad Request error instead of simply displaying a message like “S.M.A.R.T. not supported on virtual devices.”


It would be more user-friendly if Proxmox could handle this case gracefully — without an error popup — and just indicate that S.M.A.R.T. is unavailable, which is expected in virtual environments.

 

[mgabriel]

Ah, so you're talking about a nested virtualization with a virtual Proxmox. Best would be to file a festure request at https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/.

 

[tcabernoch]

I think the error is reasonably informative.
It does this when it encounters virtualized disks and is asked to provide SMART data.
It's a bad request. There's no error message. Don't do that?

On older cheap RAID systems with no HBA mode, you might have to set each disk up as a single-disk RAID0 in order to use them for ZFS. Here you see a set of them, just named after the RAID controller.



When I check the SMART info for those, I get the error OP describes.
Except, I _expect_ to get an error when I ask Proxmox to give me SMART values for a RAID0.



I guess I'd expect to get an error if I was running Proxmox nested and tried to check SMART values for a virtual disk.
That would seem to jive with the behavior they setup for the RAID use case. Bad request.