Dell PowerStore Release Notes

5Revision: A00

Release Date: September 2020

Dell EMC PowerStore Release Notes

Release Version: 1.0.2.0.5.003

Release Type: Service (SR)

Contents
Revision History..................................................................................................................................................................		1
Product Description ............................................................................................................................................................		2
Changed Features ..............................................................................................................................................................		4
Resolved Issues .................................................................................................................................................................		4
Known Issues......................................................................................................................................................................		5
Limitations.........................................................................................................................................................................		14
Environment and System Requirements		..........................................................................................................................15
Installation and Upgrade Considerations..........................................................................................................................		15
Where to Get Help ............................................................................................................................................................		16
Revision History
Document revision	Date	Comments
A00	September 2020	Original release version 1.0.2.0.5.003

Dell EMC PowerStore Release Notes

Product Description

The ground-breaking Dell EMC PowerStore achieves new levels of operational simplicity and agility, utilizing a containerbased architecture, advanced storage technologies, and intelligent automation to unlock the power of your data. Based on a scale-out architecture and hardware-accelerated advanced data reduction, PowerStore is designed to deliver enhanced resource utilization and performance that keeps pace with application and system growth. Utilizing the proven capabilities of VMware ESXi, PowerStore X models with AppsON provide the unique ability to host data-intensive and storage applications directly on the PowerStore system with a storage-based virtualization environment, with the flexibility of seamless movement of applications between the storage system and external VMware servers. PowerStore T models provide organizations with all the benefits of an enterprise unified storage platform for block, file and vVol data, while enabling flexible growth with the intelligent scale-up AND scale-out capability of appliance clusters.

Highlighted features include:

•Brand new built from scratch all NMve Platform: o All NVMe

o Active-Active architecture

o Container based PowerStoreOS o Block, File, and vVols

o NVMe Flash and Storage Class Memory (SCM) media support o 25 Gbe iSCSI and 32Gb FC support

o Compact 2U starting form factor

o Enterprise Data Services & Leading Data Reduction: o Inline dedupe and compression

o Native async replication

o Snapshots and space efficient thin clones

•Enterprise Data Services & Data Reduction:

oInline dedupe and compression

oNative async replication

oSnapshots and space efficient thin clones

oAdvanced drive failure protection and sparing technology

•Simple and intelligent Management & Serviceability:

oEmbedded management

o Built in AI for simple, autonomous storage administration and proactive health analytics

o	CloudIQ
o	VM Visibility

o New Anytime Upgrade Program

oIntegration with automation framework

•Flexible & Granular Scalability:

oScale Up in single drive increments, up to 2.8 PBe per appliance

oScale Out to 4 appliances, up to 11.3 PBe per cluster

oScale Down

•VMware:

oVMware vVols 2.0/VASA 3.0 support

oNew AppsOn hypervisor-based deployment, allowing to run Virtual Machines on the same appliance as storage without the need for an external server

2	Product Description

PowerStore deployment models and configurations

Deployment Model	Model numbers		Support Configurations
PowerStore T	1000T		Storage-centric deployments.
	3000T		Both block (storage area networks (SAN)) and file (network attached storage
			(NAS)) services are supported with PowerStore T deployments.
	5000T		Note: Hypervisor deployments are not supported on this model.
	7000T
	9000T
PowerStore X	1000X		Application and storage-centric deployments.
	3000X	Block (SAN-only) storage services with a hypervisor layer installed on the
		system. The system software is deployed on the hypervisor, which enables
	5000X	deployment of virtual machines (VMs) and customer applications within the
		hardware.
	7000X	Note: File (network attached storage (NAS)) services are not supported on this
	9000X	model.

Refer to the PowerStore product support pages (https://www.dell.com/support) for detailed user documentation.

Product Description

3

Changed Features

The following functionality has changed.

Functional Area	Feature Description	Summary of Benefits
Networking	Starting from PowerStoreOS version	The Unified PowerStore T model Cluster will be
	1.0.2 or later, Unified PowerStore T	successfully created.
	model appliances will route internal	If the external networks are misconfigured, an
	networking communication within the
		alert will be sent through PowerStore Manager
	appliance rather than the Top-of-Rack
		notifying you of the network issue.
	(ToR) switch.
		If there is an issue, you can work with your
		network administrator to resolve it.

Resolved Issues

The following high severity issues have been resolved in this release.

Issue ID	Functional Area	Description
MDT-171399	Connectivity-Networks	The PowerStore Network Configuration for Delll PowerSwitch Series Guide
		provides examples with the flowcontrol receive set to on. However, it is
		recommended to set flowcontrol receive off and flowcontrol transmit off for best
		performance.
MDT-199309	Install or Upgrade	If a: If a customer runs the PowerStore Initial Configuration Wizard (ICW) after
		PowerStore was powered on for 10 or more days, the ICW process will fail. A
MDT-199980		service provider must be called to factory reset PowerStore and continue the
		system installation process.	If a
		Additionally, if a PowerStore system has been running for over 10 days without
		any node restarts or failover events, then after the next failover event, the system
		will run into a degraded condition which may ultimately lead to system service
		disruption. A service provider must be called to clean up and recover the system.

4	Changed Features

Known Issues

The following high severity issues are reported in this release. For a list of the minor issues, see Knowledge Base article SLN320772 PowerStore Release Notes – Minor issues at: https://www.dell.com/support/article/SLN320772.

Issue ID	Functional	Description	Workaround/Resolution
	Area
MDT-152854	Connectivity -	Running an unmap operation might cause	Disable auto-unmap for applications that
	Hosts	a host I/O latency impact of more than	have this feature. Schedule unmap
		15%. You can disable auto-unmap for	operations manually to reduce the impact
		applications that have this feature, or	on hosts.
		manually schedule an unmap operation to
		reduce the impact on hosts.
MDT-154342	Connectivity -	When you add a host, in rare cases, you	Do not try adding the host again. Wait for up
	Hosts	may not see any active sessions or	to 10 minutes for the active sessions to
		connected paths for the initiators for up	appear.
		to 10 minutes on the Initiators tab.
MDT-139488	Connectivity -	Xcopy operations can impact host I/O	None
	Hosts	performance.
MDT-168926	Connectivity-	A cluster "Network validation failed with	Ignore the warning and continue configuring
	Networks	unexpected error (0xE0E700001)"	the cluster. After the cluster is created you
		message is returned erroniously while	can validate that the DNS configuration was
		validating initial configuration. The error	succesful in the PowerStore Manager.
		occurs because an internal entry for DNS
		was previously configured.
MDT-55667	Data Collection	Storage container capacity metrics are not	Look at the capacity metrics again after I/O
		available until I/O operations have begun.	operations on the storage container have
			been performed.
MDT-133408	Data Protection	When a volume group is created with	If the remote system connection is healthy,
		member volumes and is protected by a	the member volumes should automatically
		protection policy that includes a	be replicated to the destination during the
		replication rule, the volume group	next RPO cycle. To update the member
		members may be delayed in being	volumes on the destination before the next
		replicated to the remote system until the	RPO cycle, navigate to Protection->
		next RPO cycle. The default replication	Replication, select the volume group session
		rule RPO value in PowerStore Manager is	and perform a "Synchronize" operation.
		1 hour, but it can range from 5 minutes to
		24 hours.

Known Issues

5