Some Lower-End Unity Models Could Experience Single or Dual SP Reboots When Running Unity OE 5.0

This is warning and workaround about EMC Unity OE 5.0 on some Unity systems with fewer memory capacity. Let’s see what happened?

The lower-end Unity systems, in particular the Unity 300 and 300F, contain less physical memory than the higher-end Unity models.  The lower available system memory makes them more vulnerable to experience an SP reboot brought about by the “mergelogs” component of NGTRiiAGE which is run by uDoctor on SRS enabled arrays.   It is also run periodically on non-SRS enabled arrays.

If your Unity system is SRS enabled, “mergelogs” will run at least once per day. Changes intro-duced in Unity OE 5.0.x make the “mergelogs” function more memory intensive, which causes the process to run closer to the limits of the available memory budget.  If the available memory is exceeded, the SP may reboot.

A hotfix is available for this issue if you are running Unity OE 5.0.0.0.5.116.  To acquire this hot-fix, please contact Dell EMC Technical Support or your authorized service vendor and reference KB article 536786.  This knowledge base article also stipulates a work-around available to customers who have service credentials. You can disable the daily triage service within uDoctor by connecting to your system via SSH using your “service” credentials and issuing the following command:

svc_udoctor –j –d daily_triage

Hope the above workaround can preventing unplanned downtime on EMC Unity systems in our data center.

Further Reading

What’s Dell EMC Unity XT Storage?

What’s New in Dell EMC Unity OE 5.0.0.0.5.116