What can I do with a HP MSA 1040?

[Theodoraa]

So at my workplace, we have a virtualization cluster of 2 hosts backed by a HP MSA 1040. It was set up by a consulting firm before my time. The consulting firm has since dissolved. Now we are reconfiguring things, mostly due to the risk of a failure on the HP MSA 1040 taking out the whole cluster. Instead, we will be putting an appropriately sized SSD in each of the hosts to store the VMs, making the HP MSA 1040 somewhat redundant. I just finished moving the VMs to another cluster, so I took a closer looked at the hardware. The VM hosts are just 1U servers, but the MSA 1040 is a different beast.

Up until just now when I looked the box over, I was thinking that the MSA 1040 was just like any other server, and that I could just throw Linux on it, load it up with drives and put it to work. Stop laughing. The box is clearly a storage appliance and not meant to be played with in the way I had planned.

I'm trying to understand what I can do with this box. In the past, I've set up a decent 24-bay server as a Linux-based iSCSI "SAN" and used it to back VM hosts. So I'm not completely ignorant of the possibilities here. Mostly, but not completely.

At the moment, I'd be happy if I just found the right USB cable to get at either of the consoles on this thing. I can't see anything useful in vSphere, just some stats about the capacity and provisioned storage...and I can move files to and from datastores that it hosts, but that's it. Surely I can set up iSCSI targets through the CLI or a web interface, no? (Yes, I know. A bit of reading will answer all my questions. I'll probably have my answers all on my own in an hour. But there's probably room for, and interest in, discussion about this kind of box here on homelab.)

Anyways, if the HP MSA 1040 isn't useful at work, I'm free to haul it home to put it to use myself. Other than for backups, I'm coming up empty as to why I would do so. Any suggestions?

[PrashantS]

Hi,

Can use cable to connect. 

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00047337en_us&docLocale=en_US

The cable is a regular USB to mini USB cable. In formal terms, this is a USB A to USB mini B cable. Inside the P2000/MSA 2040/MSA 1040 a USB to serial converter turns the USB signal to serial. HPE MSA 2040/1040/P2000 MSA USB driver allows Microsoft Windows to recognize the USB port on HPE MSA 2040/1040/P2000 MSA Controllers.

You can use this to give IP address to MSA.

Later on you can connect it over the browser. and use GUI.

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c04220794

[ArunKKR]

Hi,

MSA 1040 can be managed in 3 ways.

1. USB CLI cable serial console connection (Cable details already shared by Prashant)

2. Access management IP through web browser

3. Telnet/SSH session to management IP.

The default log in credentials would be log in name: manage  Password: !manage

You may refer to SMU guide and below web link for more information:

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c04220794

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c03820027

[ArunKKR]

Hi,

Please let us know whether the information shared helped.

[JonPaul]

The MSA 1040 is a shared storage device. It creates RAID sets and presents sections of those RAID sets as a volume or LUN to 1 or more hosts.  Your original setup (consulting firm) utilized this feature to have a single instance of a VM, rather than sync'ing the VM from one ESXi host to the other.  So when an ESXi Cluster moved a VM from one host to another they just passed the ownership of the LUN.

The other feature of a shared storage device is that it allows expansion greater than you can have in a single server.  The MSA 1040 will allow up to 4 enclosures and 96x SFF drives which can all be presented to a host or split between multiple hosts.
If your MSA 1040 is iSCSI protocol you can present LUNs to any server on your network which has an iSCSI initiator. If it is SAS or FC then you will only be able to present LUNs to servers direct connected or in the SAN.

Your first task, which you probably have already discovered, is how do you get the login information.  The default user for the 1040 is manage / !manage   If that user does not work then you will likely need to reset the users.  There are threads on that process around, let us know if you have issues.
Another thing you should do is update/review your system for Best Practices:
https://www.hpe.com/Storage/MSAHealthCheck     Free review, all you have to do is provide the system logs.