Third Party Multipathing For Everyone

[joshp]

Does anyone have any insight as to what level of vSphere will be required for PowerPath support in vSphere?

[Jasemccarty]

Looks like Enterprise Plus.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

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[TomHowarth]

Multipath support is only in Enterprise Plus.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "VMware Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment”.

[malaysiavm]

I am little curious about this as round robin is previously experimental in esx 3.5, which I had it running in my environment for more than 6 months now. If I read it correctly with the release note, this features will not available anymore, unless u go for enterprise plus. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Craig

vExpert 2009

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[Smoggy]

with vSphere Enteprise Plus the "additional" feature is the ability to load into the hypervisor 3rd Party Multipathing modules (MPP) and take advantage of vSphere pluggable storage architecture (PSA).

In ALL vSphere editions you will always have the Native Multipathing Module (NMP) which will select the correct Storage Array Type Plug-in (SATP, used for failover) and Path Selection Plug-in (PSP used for load balancing) so out of the box, similar to in VI, shared storage is HCL listed, storage type will be identified by the ESX / NMP module, correct SATP and PSP will be applied for that storage and that basically means you still have the usual alogrithms to manually select (fixed,MRU or RoundRobin).

so basic answer is yes your wrong, you will still have the standard load balancing options available in vSphere. Enterprise Plus adds capability to include directly into the hypervisor a 3rd party MPP.

hope that helps

Lee Dilworth