Procedure to add a new enclosure in HP MSA P2000 G3

[Eduardo Crespo]

Hi Folks, Currently we have a HP MSA P2000 with P2000 G3 controllers and one P2000 6Gb drive enclosures.

I need to add an extra enclosure P2000 6Gb drive with 12 disk drives , I found the User Guide at https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c02254382 but I would like to heard your recommendation based in your experince, about the process in how to add a new enclosure in this kind of storage.

One question that I have is , Can I do it in hot or Do I need to turn off the storage ?

All information provided is much appreciated.

Thanks.

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

You can refer these forums and having some useful information,

https://community.hpe.com/t5/MSA-Storage/How-do-I-add-a-new-enclosure-to-a-P2000-G3/td-p/6365605#.W9E7lPl96Uk

https://community.hpe.com/t5/EVA-Storage/Hot-add-disk-shelf-to-MSA-P2000-G3-SAS/td-p/6015017#.W9E7mfl96Uk

I would also suggest to refer Best Practices whitepaper and refer section "Cascading Array Enclosures"

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

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[Shawn_K]

Hello,

You state you currently have a P2000 controller enclosure and a additional drive enclosure. You are planning to add another enclosure. To address whether you can add the second drive enclosure hot or not mostly depends on how you wish to cable the array.

With performance (straight-thru) cabling, adding an enclosure while the array is running is fairly easy and straight forward. I would still recommend a period of low host IO as hte array will perform several rescans to reform the backend SAS map when the new enclosure is added.

If you are going to cable the array for redundancy  you will need to perform the drive enclosure addition carefully if you are planning to do this hot. You would want to add the A path first, allow the rescan to complete and successfully see the new enclosure and drives. You would then want to recable the B path for reverse cabling as per the HPE MSA Cable Guide. Again this should be done during a period of low host IO.

After the addition of the new enclosure be sure to confirm the firmware version and upgrade to the latest.

Cheers,

Shawn