The case of Non-Certified Physical Drives Causing Warnings in Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA)

Non-Certified Physical Drives causing Warnings in Dell OpenManage (OMSA) Certified No
Date: December 3, 2017Author: Ashley H116 Comments

Dell have for a long time to my knowledge put a soft block on installation of 3rd party drives into dell servers which will cause a warning in Dell OpenManage to report it is not certified.

It would seem that since 8.5.0 Dell has finally listened to our prayers and there is now a hidden and undocumented setting to remove this soft block.

Numerous unhappy posts on the Dell Community forum cover this over the years :-

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19504074?pi43407=2

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19564855

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19677473

It would also cause issues with monitoring the drive through SNMP because querying the OID would bring back this warning value and thus we were unable to accurately determine drive pre-failures.

This was frustrating for us because we had customers we support with servers that was out of warranty and we couldn’t source Dell certified drives anymore but could get hold of the OEM equivalent. The customer wouldn’t buy a new server because it would work with new drive and there was no budget to replace it. I don’t blame them really. Yes we know it would be unsupported by Dell, but if it’s out of warranty it didn’t matter. So what do you do to remedy this you ask?

Note: If you are applying this to servers that are in warranty and you are using non-ceritfied, I’ll leave the risk for you to decide. They will find out if you are using non-certified drives anyway.

So you have installed a disk that is non-certified and you check Dell OpenManage Server Administrator you will see that Storage is reporting a warning and a physical disk reporting that it is not Certified as shown in the images below.

Non-Certified Physical Drives causing Warnings in Dell OpenManage (OMSA) Storage Health Warning

Non-Certified Physical Drives causing Warnings in Dell OpenManage (OMSA) Certified No


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1. Upgrade Dell OpenManage Server Administrator to 8.5.0 or above, if already installed go to the next step.

2. Open the stsvc.ini file located in either the C:\Program Files\Dell\SysMgt\sm or the C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\SysMgt\sm folder depending on if you have installed the 32-bit/64-bit version.

3. There should be the following

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;nonDellCertified flag for blocking all non-dell certified alerts.
NonDellCertifiedFlag=yes

Change this to the following and save the file.

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;nonDellCertified flag for blocking all non-dell certified alerts.
NonDellCertifiedFlag=no

If you do not find this line in the file you will need to add it in the following place and save the file. This is normally when you upgrade from an older version to 8.5.0. It is very important it is added after the [general] lines or the setting won’t be honored.

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;General Settings
[general]
;Amount, in seconds, to sleep between each attempt to poll the PV20x, PV21x, and PV22x enclosure(s).
EnclosurePollingInterval=30
 
;nonDellCertified flag for blocking all non-dell certified alerts.
NonDellCertifiedFlag=no

4. Once you have modified the INI file you need to restart the DSM SA Data Manager service in services.msc and Dell OMSA should now report this if you refresh the page. Non-Certified Physical Drives causing Warnings in Dell OpenManage (OMSA) Storage Health OK

If you have had success with this method please let me your know your server model, raid controller model and OMSA version in the comments below.

Update 01/03/2020: Had various reports from the comments below that this doesn’t seem to work if the server has a software raid controller such as a PERC S130/S140…