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Serviceability is further enhanced by allowing U.2 2.5” NVMe SSD mounted in the front or rear of the server to be
serviced while the server is powered on and running using an industry feature referred to as hot-plug which maximizes
availability by minimizing costly server downtime. Hot-plug is broken down into two operations:
Hot Insert: You insert an NVMe SSD into a running server.
o Surprise Insertion: Prior to physically inserting the NVMe SSD, you do not notify the system that the NVMe
SSD is about to be inserted.
Hot Removal: You remove an NVMe SSD from a running server.
o Surprise Removal: Prior to physically removing the NVMe SSD, you do not notify the system that the device
is about to be removed.
There are also orderly operations where operating system commands are used.
o Orderly Insertion: Prior to physically inserting the NVMe SSD, you notify the system that the NVMe SSD is
about to be inserted.
o Orderly Removal: Prior to physically removing the NVMe SSD, you notify the system that the NVMe SSD is
about to be removed.
PowerEdge servers and the operating systems supported on them support surprise insertion. There is no need to
notify the system before hot-inserting an NVMe SSD.
Note: For surprise removal of any storage device (SAS, SATA, USB, NVMe, etc.), the user must ensure the data is
not critical to the functioning of the system before removing the storage device. For example, a non-RAID boot storage
device or swap file storage device could typically not be removed from a running system as doing so would likely crash
the operating system.
Figure 2 Hot-Pluggable NVMe SSDs
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