Unisphere for PowerMax: Storage groups are not listed for Compliance Alert Policy Creation

To make a Compliance Alert Policy for a Storage Group, it must meet the following restrictions:

• The storage system must run HYPERMAX OS 5977 or PowerMaxOS 5978 and be registered for performance statistics collection.
• The storage group must:
  • Be either a child or a standalone. Parent storage groups are not supported.
  • Be associated with a service level other than optimized.
  • Contain volumes other than gatekeepers.
  • Be in a masking view.
  • Not have a policy currently associated with it.

In this case, the customer has 6+ storage groups that meet the above restrictions and could make the Compliance Alert Policies in their eMGMT Unisphere. This was not the case for their standalone Unisphere. The standalone had at least two local arrays, and they wanted to manage them both through that instance, where more control and service monitoring can occur.

The first local array, to be referenced as "Array 1," was able to make the Compliance Alert Policies for their storage groups. The second local array, to be referenced as "Array 2," did not list any storage groups when making a Compliance Alert Policy. Since the same storage groups on Array 2 were available for Compliance Alert Policies in their eMGMT Unisphere, this was a problem with the standalone instance.

Services were restarted and Unisphere was reinstalled, but the issue persisted. 

In troubleshooting, it was found that the storage groups in Array 2 had the exact same names as those in Array 1. Because the storage groups had the same names, Unisphere saw that an alert policy was already in place and removed them from the list of the Compliance Alert Policy create wizard.

Workaround: Rename the storage groups differently than the others. Once the names are different, the storage groups become available. 

A permanent fix is in Unisphere for PowerMax 10.0 and later versions.

This was found in Unisphere 9.2.3.4 and 9.2.3.15.