Chapter 7. Multipathing and Failover
One of the most critical elements of storage availability in the enterprise is multipathing and failover. vSphere 5, and as early as ESX 1.5, includes native multipathing (NMP) right out of the box. Although it does not provide the complex level of input/output (I/O) load balance that storage vendor’s proprietary Multipathing Input/Output (MPIO) software provides, it does an excellent job with maintaining access to the shared storage that the infrastructure uses.
In ESX versions prior to 4.0, the portion of the vmkernel responsible for multipathing and failover was referred to as legacy multipathing. It was a monolithic code built into the vmkernel. Any changes or updates to this code required installing a ...
Get Storage Implementation in vSphere® 5.0 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
