I tried replacing the battery of the RAID controller of the DELL server

As I was considering a certain case in the server room, I accidentally discovered that the LED of one server was flashing orange. When I thought that an error occurred, it disappears as soon as I thought that it was "?" And in a state I do not know that I will lit again after a while. Apparently the blinking frequency returns to normal condition (lit in blue) immediately once every 30 seconds, so it was unnoticeable to see for a moment. The above picture is the state at that time.

In order to identify the failure location, first execute the following command from the installed "Dell Server Administrator".

# Omreport chassis
Health

Main System Chassis

SEVERITY: COMPONENT
Ok: Fans
Ok: Intrusion
Ok: Memory
Ok: Power Supplies
Ok: Power Management
Ok: Processors
Ok: Temperatures
Ok: Voltages
Critical: Hardware Log
Ok: Batteries

By saying "Critical: Hardware Log", it turns out that this seems to be the cause, confirm by executing the following command.

# Omreport system esmlog

As a result, it was caused by the fact that the log was full, so we deleted the log with the following command.

# Omconfig system esmlog action = clear

But why LED orange lighting is not resolved, it can not be helped, so contact DELL support. Although I got advice a lot, I did not make myself clear, and as I looked at the log right after clearing, "The disk drive bay battery has failed.Discovered the description, that is, it is known at this stage that the battery is the cause. Further analysis of the logs revealed DELL's view that "there is a possibility of failure of the RAID controller battery or the RAID controller itself", first of all replacing the battery, that is, replacing the RAID controller with that one. The work will be from Monday, May 14th (Monday), so that people will come in support of DELL.

On Monday, May 14th (Monday), the parts arrived first in the morning. It seems that it is becoming a policy that people in support of DELL do not bring.


Open the lid and check the contents


It's a RAID controller


I tried opening another small box.


Hatake.


The contents were batteries of the RAID controller


And at 15 o'clock, a person in the vendor entrusted by DELL arrived, dragged the server and started work. Of course, since GIGAZINE has already secretly switched to another server so that GIGAZINE itself will not stop, GIGAZINE readers are completely unaware of it.


Turn the screw with a screwdriver and open the lid on the side


Perhaps I dropped power completely since I introduced this server, so I felt like I looked inside for a while


Batteries are surrounded by a red frame at the bottom left. Since it is in a position where it can be exchanged immediately, it will be as easy to work by myself if you send even the battery even the next time.


As a result of replacing, normal operation succeeded, the abnormal lighting of the LED also disappeared.

According to the person in the store who came, according to the RAID controller, what happens when the battery runs out is "write data directly to the hard disk without temporarily storing in the memory" It is said that it will become. In other words, it goes through the memory at the time of "Write", and as a result, the performance will degrade when there are many disk writes. In the case of GIGAZINE, fortunately reading was much more overwhelming and there was almost no writing, so there was almost no performance degradation.

The fact that such an article is listed is a recruitment last time, but this time it is proof that there is something big movement in the near future unlike recruitment .... stay tuned.