Dell PowerStore: CPU utilization level too high. Reduce system load prior to NDU. (cpu_usage_level_exceeded)

During a PowerStore Appliance upgrade, one of the most common warnings during a pre-upgrade health check (PUHC) is the message: CPU utilization level too high. Reduce system load prior to NDU:

This is a 2-node PowerStore cluster which is to be upgraded from 3.2.x to 3.6.x. The existing checks used to find CPU usage include management and platform CPU cores. As a result, on an idle system, it sometimes catches one of these cores running above 50% and fails the health check. In most cases, this is a false positive message. To validate this, we switch to the Hardware tab and then to Performance:

To view the CPU utilization, we select Categeory; CPU Utilization on the left-hand side and set the Timeline to Last 24 hours so that we get a useful overview:

As is difficult to see, the CPU utilization in the last 24 hours is a maximum of 15% for the first appliance. However, if you look at the second appliance, the world looks a little different:

The general guidance would be:

• If the CPU utilization is around or below 50%, the upgrade may continue.
• If the CPU utilization is over 50%, the upgrade should be deferred to a period when the system is less busy.

To put it simply, slow down the I/O and CPU utilization to start the upgrade.

Sources: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000192018/powerstore-cpu-utilization-level-too-high-reduce-system-load-prior-to-ndu-cpu-usage-level-exceeded

That’s it for this blog post, if you have any questions, please use the comment section. 🙂