MPIO, ALUA and Vsphere Standard Edition

[taylorb]

I'm having a hard time making sense of the feature differences between Vsphere standard and enterprise editions when it comes to storage.   In the feature comparison it says that standard doesn't support third party plugins or MPIO.  But I know it at least supports basic MPIO because I have it running at one of my sites with ISCSI.    So I am wondering what exactly it doesn't support, and specifically wondering about MPIO on FC SAN that wants me to enable ALUA.  

[Gortee]

Evening,

I may be way wrong but I believe this is related to functions like VAII.  Personally I would go Enterprise... DRS is really your friend.  You really want it if you plan on building a cluster.

Thanks,

J

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Take a look at VMware KB: Frequently Asked Questions for vStorage APIs for Array Integration which explains the features that are available with VAAI.

ALUA and the integrated MPIO will work independently of the edition, you just cannot use 3rd party software.

André