Dynamic Multi-Pathing 7.3.1 Administrator's Guide - Linux
- Understanding DMP
- Setting up DMP to manage native devices
- Using Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) devices with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
- Administering DMP
- Administering DMP using the vxdmpadm utility
- Gathering and displaying I/O statistics
- Specifying the I/O policy
- Administering disks
- Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
- About discovering disks and dynamically adding disk arrays
- How to administer the Device Discovery Layer
- Changing the disk device naming scheme
- Dynamic Reconfiguration of devices
- Reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control using the Dynamic Reconfiguration tool
- Manually reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control
- Event monitoring
- Performance monitoring and tuning
- Appendix A. DMP troubleshooting
- Appendix B. Reference
Load balancing
By default, DMP uses the Minimum Queue I/O policy for load balancing across paths for all array types. Load balancing maximizes I/O throughput by using the total bandwidth of all available paths. I/O is sent down the path that has the minimum outstanding I/Os.
For Active/Passive (A/P) disk arrays, I/O is sent down the primary paths. If all of the primary paths fail, I/O is switched over to the available secondary paths. As the continuous transfer of ownership of LUNs from one controller to another results in severe I/O slowdown, load balancing across primary and secondary paths is not performed for A/P disk arrays unless they support concurrent I/O.
For other arrays, load balancing is performed across all the currently active paths.
You can change the I/O policy for the paths to an enclosure or disk array. This operation is an online operation that does not impact the server or require any downtime.