VNX 5500 Can it be saved

Hello Retired Hobbyist,

With a VNX 5500 you need the first 4 drives located in slot0-4 in the system. The image to boot and control your VNX is on those drives. Without the drives or the image you will not be able to reconfigure your VNX5500. The Image is for support and partners only.

 If I move 4 of the 300GB drives to the first 4 slots, can it be restored or is it just a boat anchor? 

I still work part time and have partner status.

Hello Retired Hobbyist,

If you add 5 drives to slots 0-4 and then load the image on the drives, you should be able to get it running and be able to use it.

I put 5 300GB drives in the fist 5 slots and found instructions to reimage.  I was able to make the serial connection and interrupt the boot sequence. Utilities will not load. I think that comes from the first 5 drives too.

Before I persue this much more, I have to ask if this will work at all with no license information. What are the base functions with no additional licenses?  I'm looking for a terabyte of fiber channel SAN attached LUNs.

Hi,

Thanks for your question.

I don’t see a list of all of the features that are missing without a license, but some are replication, mview, FAST cache, security and compliance, encryption.

Let us know if you have any additional questions.

It's looking like this can't be done with having at least one good vault drive. The utility partition needed to reimage has to be on one of the vault drives.

Unless someone can point me to a procedure to restore the utility partition, I think I have to consider this a parts unit.