HPE MSA starting from 0

[Isanderthul]

Hello All

Yesterday I purchased an old HPE MSA 1040. I am hoping to use it as storage for my files. I also have a Gen 8 and a Gen 10. Can someone please give me some guidance on how to start:
some of my noob questions:
1) Do I need to connect the MSA 1040 to a HP server to use it?
2) The unit has two controllers, do I need to plug a network cable into both controllers, or is one cable enough?
3) Each controller has 2 iSCSI ports, do I have to use those, or is the normal ethernet port good enough? (I am not needing blinding fast read and write, a single 1Gbps connection would be good enough).
Thank you very much

[ArunKKR]

Hi,

1)Yes. MSA is a block level storage device. You would need to create volumes in MSA and present it to the HPE server.
You could then initialize/format the volumes and assign a drive letter (assuming host server OS is windows).
2) MSA 1040 has 2 controllers and 2 iscsi host ports in each controller for redundancy as well as load balancing.
Its recommended to connect iscsi ethernet cable from host server to each controller for redundancy in case one controller goes down/crashes.

3) MSA has management ethernet port to access SMU(storage management utility) as well iscsi host ports on controller.
You would need to use iscsi host ports on controller to present MSA volumes to host server.

Please refer to MSA SMU guide, cabling guide  and user guide for more information on how to configure MSA:

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

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c04220806

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c04220803