EMC VNX/VNX2/VMAX: 600GB 15k Drive Increased failure rates – with fix.

This is the second time I have had EMA technical advisories recently regarding issues with 15k SAS disks. The first one I wrote about here.

It doesn’t sound quite as serious as the last one (OMG, DATA LOSS), but worthy of a look and fix. Details; and full link here and excerpt just below

“” EMC Technical Advisory

This notification is to alert you of the following technical advisory:

ETA 195555: VNX Series and Symmetrix VMAX Series: Certain 600GB 15K RPM SAS and FC disk drives may experience increased replacement rates when the drives have remained idle for extended periods of time.

For Technical Support regarding the content of an advisory, contact your local service team or the EMC Customer Support Center. “”

The affected part numbers are;

• VMAX: 005049033, 005049088    VNX/VNX2: 005049675, 005049677

…and, of course, I just happen to have some of these drives in one of my VNX arrays.

As usual, there are multiple ways to check if you have the drives. From naviseccli;

Which will return all the disks with the tla (serial) contiaining the 2 x affected numbers, including bus#, dae# and position.

If you add the ‘-quiet‘ option you get a simple true if the string is found, which is tidy

or from Unisphere, System tab, Disks and filter by the part numbers.

Note the firmware too;

To fix any applicable drives, an online firmware update is required, which is normally a NDU and applied easily using USM. Here’s how;

Login to USM & Download the disk firmware packages- > Downloads > Download DIsk Firmware Packages and complete the wizard. Select the appropriate firmware, enter your support creds and follow the bouncing ball to get the fw files ready.

Now to actually perform the upgrade. Login to your Array and click on Software, then Disk Firmware. Then Install Disk Firmware Online

Wait while the checks are done…then choose to Install from Local Repository

Click Browse, choose the file you downloaded and click Open. File will be transferred, then click Next

Wait while checks are done and click Next. Verify the correct FW and disks are evident.

You can also choose the install speed, but this is quick and there’s only 15 disks to process anyway, so I leave the setting on Low and click Next.

Final checks..Yes there’s a lot to verify ! Remediate any issues (I had one soft media warning) and Next.. Proceed with the install, monitoring the progress.

Complete verification.

Verify new Firmware version from naviseccli and Unisphere respectively;

Firmware revision now at C7A0 from  C650, so JOB DONE!

All in all this was about a 10-15 minute job max, although the amount of steps may seem otherwise.

Very quick and easy once you know how 🙂