Only ports A1 and B1 come up, no matter what I try

[arodriguezr_mcs]

Hello. I have a 2052 MSA SAN connected to two Gen 10 DL360, each with a two port FibreChannel 8GB cards running VMware Enterprise.

I can only get ports A1 and B1 to come up no matter what combination I do.

If I do ports A1 and B1 to ports 1 and 2 of server 1 or server 2, they both come on for both servers.

If I do port A1 to port 1 of server 1 and port B1 to port 1 of server 2, they both come on.

BUT! If I do A2 to port 2 of server 1 and port B2 to port 2 of server 2, they stay off.

OR! If I do A2 to port 2 of server 2 and B2 to port 2 of server 1, they stay off.

I can get them to light on momentarily when either resetting or changing port speed from auto to fixed speeds (either 4 or 8GB).

I've done SFP adapter swaps all around (SAN and server side), so I don't suspect any faults on the SFP adapters themselves. We are hoping to get this resolved ASAP to finally be able to use the storage for a server migration.

This SAN is being repurposed from another project where they were attached to a SAN switch and used by a Cisco UCS blade cluster, but now are being direct attached to these HP Gen 10 nodes. All previous mappings, hosts and host groups were eliminated. The volumes were deleted, and new Raid 6 volume groups were created with the SSD Read Cache.

[JonPaul]

@arodriguezr_mcs 
It sounds like some of the SFPs are incorrect for the MSA.   The MSA requires specific SFPs.
Check the MSA interface:
  CLI>  show system     (General health)
  CLI>  show ports    (Specific to the array host ports)
  CLI>  show ports detail   (If SFPs are correct, it will show the supported speeds)
MSA 2050 allows port configuration from FC to iSCSI.  It could be that the ports you are trying to use are configured for iSCSI.
You can also do a physical check of the SFP and see if they are labeled as HPE and MSA or MSA 2040 (same SFP was used for both 2040 and 2050)
You can also try using ports 3 and 4 of the controllers.  

[arodriguezr_mcs]

Following up, we did another SFP adapter swap at the MSA end and two adapters appear to be bad. Strange how two SFPs went bad simultaneously. I created a case in HPE and thew SAN lost support a couple of months ago.

We are in the process of getting four more SFP adapters since only HPE branded ones are usable...

[JonPaul]

@arodriguezr_mcs 
Glad you found the issue.
Just to note, not only do you need HPE SFPs but you also need HPE MSA SFPs.  HPE sells a number of different FC SFPs which are unique to the devices they install into.  B-Series Switches, C-Series switches, MSA, ...   HPE also sells devices which will use whatever SFP you install.
You might want to electronically or physically check around to see if someone didn't swap some SFPs.