Well hidden in their labyrinthian web site, you may stumble upon HP’s “Array Configuration Utility (ACU) Offline CD for Smart Array”. A plain bootable CD, useful when ACU simply can’t be installed on the server/OS.
Example: I needed to tweak SSP (Selective Storage Presentation) settings on an MSA1000, connected through Fiber Channel HBAs (QLogic) to some rather old HP DL580 G2. The servers were running VMware ESX 3i 3.5.0 build-207095 (the latest one compatibile with those kind of CPUs) with no management agents installed. Since the MSA1000 can only be managed “in-band” or via a non standard serial cable the Customer, of course, lost long ago, I rebooted an ESX host with the offline ACU CD…
Before that, I also tried a standard SmartStart CD, but it didn’t work. I had version 7.80 (way younger than the servers/HBAs), but no link lights on the FC switch, meaning no firmware loaded on the QLogic card, meaning no SmartStart supported HBA drivers. Offline ACU CD version 8.20.19 worked like a charm instead. Find its latest release by searching “array configuration utility” on hp.com, clicking on “Download software”, then “Linux GUI ACU”. Download link is somewhere in that page…