A PRIMARY STORAGE Newsletter – Dell EMC Unity – October 2021 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

20212021

DELL EMC UNITY

QUARTERLY SUPPORT
HIGHLIGHTS
OCTOBER 2021
Recommended Code

Dell EMC Unity Operating Environment (“Unity OE”) 5.1.1.0.5.005 is the latest release for all Dell EMC Unity (“Unity”)
products. It was released on October 1, 2021. It has over 1.3 million Run Time Hours. Unity OE is customer
upgradable.

Target Code

Dell Technologies has established Target Code for each product to ensure stable and reliable environments. Target
Code is a specific code release that has successfully met specific criteria that enables it to be a highly trusted and
recommended code release. Dell Technologies encourages customers to upgrade to a Target Code version to ensure
a stable and reliable environment. If a customer requires features or enhancements that are provided by a new version,
the customer should upgrade to that version. The current Target version for all Unity models is 5.0.7.

Model Code Family Target Code Run Time Hours

Dell EMC Unity 4.x and 5.x 5.0.7.0.5.008 >22 million hours

You can find a full list of Dell Technologies product target codes and run time hours at:

https://dl.dell.com/content/docu39695_target-revisions-and-run-time-hours.pdf

P a g e 1 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Are you Code Current?

Are You Code Current? Being code current is defined as
running code that is less than 12 months old. If you are not
sure how to check, then a good indicator is your OE
revision. 5.0.4 was released 12 months ago. If you are
running 5.0.4 or older, not only are you missing out on new
features, functionality, and fixes, but you are also not taking
advantage of current security enhancements.

Being code current is important. Customers on newer

code enjoy greater functionality, fewer outages, and fewer
service requests.

Recommended Drive Firmware Bundle

The latest version of the drive firmware bundle in V18. Customers are advised to regularly update their drive firmware
using the latest drive firmware bundle. Drive firmware is customer upgradable using the Drive Firmware upgrade
wizard in Unisphere. You will see a Unisphere alert when new firmware is available for your specific drives. The
wizard will download and install the latest firmware.

You can read the drive release notes from the link here: 000021322

End of Standard Support (EOSS)

The updated Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group Software Standard Support Policy is available here: docu102223

These tables provide the upcoming hardware and OE software EOSS* dates for all Unity products:

Unity System End of Standard Support dates:

Model EOSS* Date

Dell EMC Unity 300 July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 300 DC TBD

Dell EMC Unity 300F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 350F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 350F DC TBD

Dell EMC Unity 400 July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 400 DC TBD

Dell EMC Unity 400F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 450F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 450F DC TBD

P a g e 2 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Dell EMC Unity 500 July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 500 DC July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 500F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 550F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 550F DC July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 600 July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 600 DC July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 600F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 650F July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity 650F DC July 31, 2025

Dell EMC Unity XT 380 TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 380F TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 480 TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 480F TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 680 TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 680F TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 880 TBD

Dell EMC Unity XT 880F TBD

Unity Operating Environment software, Release dates and End of Standard Support dates:

Product Version Release Date EOSS* Date Release Notes Search

Keyword **
Unity OE 4.5 31-Jan-19 31-Jan-22 docu92422
Unity OE 5.0.0 27-Jun-19 30-Jun-22 docu94618
Unity OE 5.0.1 23-Oct-19 31-Oct-22 docu96122
Unity OE 5.0.2 16-Jan-20 31-Jan-23 docu97010
Unity OE 5.0.3 18-May-20 31-May-23 docu98322
Unity OE 5.0.4 10-Nov-20 30-Nov-23 docu101181
Unity OE 5.0.5 3-Dec-20 31-Dec-23 docu101510
Unity OE 5.0.6 8-Jan-21 31-Jan-24 docu102200
Unity OE 5.0.7 15-Apr-21 30-Apr-24 docu103661
Unity OE 5.1.0 21-Jun-21 30-Jun-24 docu104562
Unity OE 5.1.1 01-Oct-21 31-Oct-24 docu106348

* EOSS = End of Standard Support. EOSS indicates the date after which standard technical support is no longer available.
Post Standard Support for the hardware may be available after EOSS.

** The Release Notes are available from www.dell.com/support. Search for the keyword listed in this column.

P a g e 3 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Recent Release Information

Highlights of Unity OE 5.1.1.0.5.005:

• This release fixed a single defect affecting specific Solid State Drives (SSDs) with S109 firmware:
o Issue description: shortly after creating a pool on a new system, multiple drives may receive multi-bit
CRC (cyclic redundancy check) errors and become faulted, taking the pool offline.

Highlights of the immediately prior release, Unity OE 5.1.0.0.5.394:

• UnityVSA Cloud scalability:

o Dual-SP capacity increase to 350TB

o Scale Dual-SP UnityVSA SPs to 12 cores and 96 GB RAM

• Multiprotocol File migration from VNX: migrate multiprotocol-configured VDMs from a VNX source system to
destination Unity systems.

• vSphere ESXi 7.0 support for Unity and UnityVSA.

• Host Groups: Hosts grouped together for streamlined management of access to block resources (LUNs,
consistency groups, and VMFS datastores).

• Time zone aware Snapshots: Schedule time zone applies only to snapshot scheduling and asynchronous
replication throttling scheduling and is set through CLI.

• Drive firmware version 17 bundle is included.

• Expanded key management (KMIP) Support:

o Dell EMC CloudLink

o Thales Vormetric

o Thales CipherTrust Manager

o Unbound Key Control

• Unity XT Series now supports a 4-port 32Gb Fibre Channel I/O module
For more details about this release, please refer to the release notes: docu104562.

P a g e 4 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Top Customer Viewed KB Articles

The following Knowledgebase articles were frequently referenced in the previous 90 days:

Article Number Title

000189150 SP Internal Disk Degraded. The solid state drive (SSD) is reaching the end of its service life
expectancy and needs to be replaced
000189458 After upgrading to OE 5.1, Veeam backups stop working (Dell EMC Correctable)

000188019 Call home alert 14:604b4 M.2 SSD Degraded.

000184593 LUN appears online but is unavailable for IO

000185419 How to Check LDAP and LDAPS Connection State

000183813 How do I create a Service Request (SR) for my Cloud Tiering Appliance/VE (CTA/VE) with
Unity Product
000186058 How to enable CPU and memory utilization monitoring

000187917 NFS clients hang or encounter performance issues when accessing the destination side of
replication
000183761 Integrated SRS may stop working after July 14th, 2021 for Dell EMC Unity OE below 5.0.4

000188553 Host xxxx does not have any initiators logged into the storage system
000184863 Asynchronous Replication triggered over Space Reclamation causes Latency

000187757 How to check if System VDM (SVDM) is running on SPA or SPB

000189665 Enabling ABE on SMB share fails with error code 0x4

000190227 After upgrade to 5.1, certain commands issued by Solaris 10 clients fail
(Dell EMC Correctable)
000190979 Upgrading to Unity OE code to 5.1 fails with warning related to drive firmware 342
(DTA 183830)
000190984 After upgrade to 5.1, some LDAP users may have trouble logging in to Unisphere

000190184 Non-specific error in GUI while uploading Unity OE code for upgrade (Dell EMC
Correctable)
000191159 Upgrade to 5.1 code may fail due to lack of inodes or Metrics Database inconsistency (Dell
EMC Correctable)
000191205 Under certain filesystem out-of-space conditions, upgrade to 5.1 code can fail

000188804 Delete VMware Virtual Volume jobs hanging (Dell EMC Correctable)

P a g e 5 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

000190077 Saving Configuration from Unisphere returns an error message. (Dell EMC Correctable)

000190415 How to set the capacity alarm threshold of the file system

000191259 Unable to generate CSR certificate for SSL [User Correctable]

000191522 Increased latency on NFS exports lasting about 30 seconds when the export settings are
modified

New KB Articles

The following KB Articles were created recently:

Date
Article Number Title
Published

000189665 Enabling ABE on SMB share fails with error code 0x4 5-Aug-21

000190311 Duplicated item in host list, Error Code: 0x900a12b 12-Aug-21

000190415 How to set the capacity alarm threshold of the file system 19-Aug-21

FTP/SFTP download may failed when customer FTP/SFTP server (NFS

000190195 client) use Unity NFS share on Unity with NFSv4.0/NFSv4.1 2-Aug-21

After upgrade to 5.1, certain commands issued by Solaris 10 clients fail (Dell
000190227 EMC Correctable) 3-Aug-21

Non-specific error in GUI while uploading Unity OE code for upgrade (Dell
000190184 EMC Correctable) 3-Aug-21

Under certain filesystem out-of-space conditions, upgrade to 5.1 code can

000191205 fail 2-Sep-21

Drive command timeout errors may result in performance issues and data
000190983 unavailability 26-Aug-21

000191259 Unable to generate CSR certificate for SSL 15-Sep-21

Increased latency on NFS exports lasting about 30 seconds when the export
000191522 settings are modified 15-Sep-21

000191028 NTLM Clients may encounter temporary access issues for SMB Shares 19-Sep-21

000191051 Data store Thin clone rename dose not complete in GUI 31-Aug-21

000191697 Unexpected SP reboot due to memory map issues 22-Sep-21

000191785 Replication connection failed to validate after upgrading to code 5.1 23-Sep-21

000192245 CAVA timeout can cause unexpected SP reboots 13-Oct-21

P a g e 6 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Technical Advisories and Security Advisories

The following Advisories were released in the last 1.5 years:

Article ID Dell Technical Advisories Date

DTA 185837 Dell EMC Unity: MetroSync (File Sync) replication destination may May 11, 2021
experience inconsistent data (User Correctable)
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.7 or newer

DTA 183819 Dell EMC Unity with CTA: Incomplete rehydration of files while using CTA Mar 29, 2021
12.1 Recall task or Delete Orphans task with file sizes of 2 MB or larger.
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.7 or newer

DTA 183830 Arrays with drives running firmware version C342 and OE version 4.X can Mar 8, 2021
experience hung drives after updating to Unity 5.X
Resolution: Upgrade drive firmware to latest version

DTA 183213 Implementation of Windows security update may result in Domain Feb22, 2021
Controller communication issues
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.6 or newer to add Secure
RPC functionality.

DTA 543817 During SP hardware maintenance activities, for certain drive models, Jun 4, 2020
multiple drives may power down which may result in potential data
unavailability
Resolution: Upgrade drive firmware to latest version

DTA 542005 Certain SSD drives are improperly calculating the number of days before Mar-26, 2020
End of Life (EOL)
Resolution: Upgrade drive firmware to latest version AND Upgrade to
Unity OE version 5.0.1 or newer

Article ID Dell Security Advisories Date

DSA 2021-139 Security Update for Multiple Vulnerabilities Jul 1, 2021

Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.7 or newer

DSA 2021-083 Security Update for Multiple Vulnerabilities Apr 19, 2021
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.7 or newer

DSA 2020-276 Security Update for Multiple Vulnerabilities Dec 17, 2020
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.4 or newer

DSA 2020-275 Security Update for an International Components for Unicode (ICU) Dec-17, 2020
Vulnerability
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.4 or newer

DSA 2020-132 Security Update for Multiple Third Party Components May 18, 2020
Resolution: Upgrade to Unity OE version 5.0.3 or newer

P a g e 7 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Videos

This table provides links to Unity videos:

Part type Part Time Video

Drives Add a 2.5-inch drive to 25-drive Disk Array Enclosure 1:14 Watch Video
(DAE)

Replace a 2.5-inch drive in a 25-drive DAE 2:50 Watch Video

Add an optional 3.5-inch drive to a 15-drive DAE 1:14 Watch Video

Replace a 3.5-inch Drive in a 15-drive DAE 2:50 Watch Video

Replace a DPE internal M.2 drive: 3:28 Watch Video

Unity x00/F Series, x50/F Series, and 380/F

Replace a DPE internal M.2 drive: 3:23 Watch Video

Unity 480/F, 680/F, 880/F

DAE Add a 15-drive Disk Array Enclosure (DAE) 2:15 Watch Video

Add a 25-drive DAE 2:17 Watch Video

Replace a DAE enclosure 5:15 Watch Video

Power Replace a Disk Processor Enclosure (DPE) Power Supply 2:40 Watch Video
Supply
Replace a 25-drive DAE power supply with cooling Module 1:32 Watch Video

Fan / Cooling Replace a DPE cooling module: 3:52 Watch Video

Unity x00/F Series, x50/F Series, and 380/F

Replace a DPE cooling module 3:02 Watch Video

Unity 480/F, 680/F, 880/F

I/O Module Add an optional I/O module 2:20 Watch Video

Replace a faulty I/O module 2:20 Watch Video

Memory Replace a DPE DIMM: 3:48 Watch Video

Unity x00/F Series, x50/F Series, and 380/F

Replace a DPE memory module 3:00 Watch Video

Unity 480/F, 680/F, 880/

Embedded Replace a faulty Embedded Module 2:44 Watch Video

Module

Port Card Add a DPE 4-Port Card to the embedded module 3:28 Watch Video

P a g e 8 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

Part type Part Time Video

Link Control Replace a Link Control Card (LCC) in a 15 Drive DAE 3:47 Watch Video
Card
Replace a Link Control Card (LCC) in a 25 Drive DAE 3:42 Watch Video

SFP+ Add a CNA (Converged Network Adapter) SFP+ 4:10 Watch Video
Transceiver (Small Form-factor Pluggable) transceiver

Replace an SFP+ transceiver 2:38 Watch Video

Storage Replace a Storage Processor (SP) 8:25 Watch Video

Processor

Quick Start – DPE Quick Start: Unity x00/F Series, x50/F Series, and 3:14 Watch Video
Install 380/F

DPE Quick Start: Unity 480/F, 680/F, 880/F Series 2:55 Watch Video

P a g e 9 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

This newsletter is available via Product Update notifications provided by Dell Technologies Online Support.

Customer Experience Engineering publishes quarterly Uptime Bulletins. This publication covers
remediations to recently-discovered issues, new features, and enhancements to existing features. Click here
for the latest issue. A Product Update Notification is sent when a new issue is released.

To learn how to subscribe to Product Updates→

To access the SolVe Online website→

P a g e 10 | 11
 Dell EMC Unity Storage Newsletter - October 2021

We want to hear from you! Please take a few minutes to fill out this short survey and let us know what you think of the
Newsletter. Simply click below:

Proactive Newsletter Communication Survey

Please feel free to suggest any modifications.

Copyright © 2021 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its
subsidiaries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Published Nov 2021

Dell believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date.
The information is subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED “AS-IS. “DELL MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND
WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. USE, COPYING, AND DISTRIBUTION OF ANY DELL SOFTWARE
DESCRIBED IN THIS PUBLICATION REQUIRES AN APPLICABLE SOFTWARE LICENSE.
Published in USA

Support Page: [Dell EMC Unity]

P a g e 11 | 11