topic Re: Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary? in Network Security

Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary?

Supercell292929 — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 14:55:02 GMT

Hello,

I am migrating from a faulty ASA 5555X to a replacement. I would like to swap the two from a remote location (no HA). The only caveat is that the faulty ASA has two mirrored 120GB SSD's and the replacement does not. FirePower is not running on either, nor is IPS. Do I need the SSD's for any reason?

Thank you in advance,

supercell

Re: Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary?

Bogdan Nita — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 07:30:43 GMT

SSDs are required for use with the services modules, like Firepower or CX.

SSDs are not required for ASA platform to function.

Re: Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary?

Marvin Rhoads — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 12:49:20 GMT

Bogdan is correct.

However I would suggest migrating the SSDs from the faulty ASA to the new one. That way you have them in place should you decide to use Firepower later.

Re: Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary?

Supercell292929 — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 14:41:30 GMT

Ok. Thank you.

If I have a production ASA 5555X and would like to add the two SSD's from a faulty ASA 5555X (no FirePower, no CX on the faulty ASA) could I physically migrate the two SSD's to the live production ASA without downtime/need to reboot?

Thank you,

supercell

Re: Service Modules: SSD drives for ASA 5555X: are these necessary?

Marvin Rhoads — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 14:45:59 GMT

They are hot-swappable (i.e. you can put them into a running ASA without downtime).

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/asa/hw/maintenance/5500xguide/5500xhw/asa_procs.html#pgfId-1097873

I don't believe they will be properly initialized until the ASA reloads and recognizes them via power on self-test (POST) as part of the inventory. However if you aren't using them with the service module feature then that's immaterial.