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Surprise removal of NVMe devices
6 NVMe Surprise Removal on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running Linux operating systems | 451
2 Surprise removal of NVMe devices
2.1 Supported and unsupported scenarios for surprise removal of NVMe
devices
The following table describes the supported and unsupported scenarios while performing surprise removal of
NVMe devices.
Supported and unsupported scenarios for surprise removal of NVMe devices
Supported scenarios
Unsupported scenarios
Surprise removal of a single NVMe device at
a time is supported.
The following requirements ensure
successful surprise removal of NVMe
devices:
• Surprise removal must be performed within
one-second period, as a slower surprise
removal may cause the operating system
to crash.
• To avoid an operating system crash, a
fifteen-second time interval should be
provided between successive hot-plug
operations to ensure that the operating
system, applications, and drivers have
enough time to fully handle the operation.
• Performing surprise removal of the drive that
has the operating system installed or the
drive that has a swap partition.
• Performing surprise removal when the
operating system is booting up.
• Performing surprise removal of an NVMe
device when another NVMe device is being
hot inserted, or within 15 seconds of another
NVMe device being hot inserted.
• Performing surprise removal of two or more
NVMe devices serially without a fifteen
second time interval between the surprise
removals.
• Surprise removal of an NVMe device that is
either directly or partially assigned to a
virtual machine.
Note: Specific solutions may have additional requirements to perform successful surprise removal. For more
information, see your solution documentation.
2.2 Identifying the NVMe device slot and verifying surprise removal
This section describes a scenario where /dev/nvme0n1 is the device to be surprise removed. The slot
numbers used in this section are specific only to this use case.
Note: Surprise removing an NVMe device that is in use may result in data loss. It is recommended that you
create a data backup before surprise removing the NVMe device.
To perform surprise removal of an NVMe device:
1. Use the command nvme list to list the NVMe devices connected to the server.
2. Use the command nvme list-subsys to retrieve the PCI bus/device/function number of the
/dev/nvme0n1 device.
3. Determine the PCIe slot number using the PCI bus/device/function number and surprise remove the
NVMe device from slot 22.