Dell Unity™ Family Configuring SupportAssist

Prerequisites for SupportAssist

As prerequisites for enabling SupportAssist on the storage system, your Unity system must have the following:

• Operating environment (OE) version 5.3 or later.
• Unity system is initialized (a universal key is present).
  NOTE:SupportAssist is initialized on new Unity systems with OE version 5.3 or later, during the manufacturing process. For Unity systems being upgraded to OE 5.3 or later with Integrated or Centralized ESRS configured before upgrade, the Unity system is initialized during the upgrade process. However, SupportAssist does not initialize when any of the following conditions exist:

  • Integrated or Centralized ESRS is not configured before upgrade to OE 5.3 or later.
  • A universal key is not present. In these cases, an access key and customer-supplied PIN must be obtained to initialize SupportAssist as part of the manual enabling and configuring SupportAssist process.
  • If either ESRS gateway (version 3.x) or SupportAssist Enterprise (version 4.y) is used as the gateway server for Centralized ESRS. The Secure Connect Gateway server version 5.12.00.10 or later must be used.
  • Your Unity system was configured for integrated ESRS but could only connect to the public network through a proxy server before the upgrade.
    NOTE:Automatic conversion from integrated ESRS to SupportAssist during upgrade can only succeed on those Unity systems that can directly connect to the public network.
• At least one DNS server must be configured on the storage system.
• Unrestricted network access from Unity to the Support Center backend (esrs3-core.emc.com) over the Internet using HTTPS (for non-proxy environments).
• Do not use dynamic IP addresses (DHCP) for any components of the Secure Connect Gateway servers or managed devices unless they are configured with the FQDN of the Secure Connect Gateway server.
• Network traffic over ports 443 and 8443 is required for SupportAssist functionality and is required for remote support personnel to perform many break or fix tasks using SupportAssist.
• If remote access using SSH is required, ensure that ports 22 and 8443 are open on the storage system.
• SSL/TLS inspection and certificate proxying are not permitted for SupportAssist network traffic.
• Unity OE version 5.5 requires that your system contact information must be specified to configure or modify SupportAssist.
  NOTE:If the contact information is not specified in an earlier Unity OE release and Support Assist is enabled, the following notifications are generated after upgrading to Unity OE version 5.5:

  • A warning icon appears along with the other controls at the top right-side of the page. Click the warning icon to go to the page to specify the contact information.
  • An alert notification to add the contact information appears on the Events Alerts page.

  Once the contact information has been added, the following occurs:

  • The warning icon no longer appears.
  • A new information alert is generated which indicates that the contact information is set.
  • The previous warning alert is marked as inactive.