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

[Supercell292929]

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

[Bogdan Nita · Accepted solution]

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

SSDs are not required for ASA platform to function.

[Marvin Rhoads]

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.

[Supercell292929]

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

[Marvin Rhoads]

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.