Tonight I was trying to fully clear our older MSA 2040 SAN, which is getting a new storage lease, to life. To my surprise, when I tried to clear the volumes and vDisks off this SAN, I found one disk group that had been quarantined, and the GUI wouldn't let me remove it, no matter what process I tried. This MSA isn't under warranty, and there was no way to contact HPE support for help. HPE forums always finished with "contact support" and "I can't share the special commands in a forum". Beyond frustrating.
Just a note: the MSA family is a rebrand of Dot Hill (now Seagate) AssuredSAN. Lenovo and Dell both have the same products. It's the same CLI in the Lenovo at least.
To force a disk deletion:
From CLI, create a new user with the role of "diagnostic"
# show users (to verify existing user accounts and roles)
# create user <new username> role diagnostic
The admin will be immediately prompted for a new password; use a complex password (one special character, one number, A-Z, a-z)
Verify the new user has been created by entering “show users” CLI command
After the new user account is created, log into the A controller CLI using the new diagnostic user account.
From CLI prompt, enter the "show disk-groups" command to verify disk-groups and to identify the foreign disk group you want to remove. Unfortunately, your existing disk group and the foreign disk group have the same name, capacity and RAID version so your approach to removing based upon SN is the best way to specify the appropriate disk-group for deletion.
From CLI, enter the following command:
# set advanced-settings virtual-pool-delete-override on
User will be prompted, enter “yes”
Enter “show advanced-settings” to confirm the configuration successfully entered:
The user should see “Virtual Pool Delete Override: Enabled” near the bottom of the list; it appears only when enabled.
After entering the above command to enable virtual-pool-delete-override, you will only have 15 minutes to complete delete operations; otherwise, you will need to re-enable it under the diagnostic user and continue where you left off.
After enabling virtual-pool-delete-override, continue attempting to remove the disk group using the SN approach you previously tried.
Get the vdisk or disk-group serial number if you don't have it. When running the "show disk-group" command, the serial shows as the very long hex number.
Execute removal:
# remove disk-groups diskgroupserialnumer or
# remove vdisks diskgroupserialnumer
Restart both controllers (MC and SC).
# restart mc both
#restart sc both
This was done on an HPE MSA 2040, with storage firmware GL220P008-01. This process worked perfectly for me and allowed me to fully clear and recover all disks in the SAN. What was only 6TB before this process is now allowing me to use the full 11TB after configuring the new disk groups and volumes.
Credits: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Enterprise-Storage/S2200-3200-dequrantine-diskgroup/m-p/3682552
Hard to believe a Lenovo post helped me resolve this issue on an HPE 2040 SAN.
