Veritas InfoScale™ Virtualization Guide - Linux on ESXi
- Section I. Overview
- About Veritas InfoScale solutions in a VMware environment
- Section II. Deploying Veritas InfoScale products in a VMware environment
- Getting started
- Understanding Storage Configuration
- Section III. Use cases for Veritas InfoScale product components in a VMware environment
- Application availability using Cluster Server
- Multi-tier business service support
- Improving storage visibility, availability, and I/O performance using Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- How DMP works
- Improving data protection, storage optimization, data migration, and database performance
- Protecting data with Veritas InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Optimizing storage with Veritas InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Migrating data with Veritas InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Improving database performance with Veritas InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Setting up virtual machines for fast failover using Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability on VMware disks
- About setting up Storage Foundation Cluster File High System High Availability on VMware ESXi
- Configuring coordination point (CP) servers
- Section IV. Reference
How DMP works
Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) provides greater availability, reliability, and performance by using the path failover feature and the load balancing feature. These features are available for multiported disk arrays from various vendors.
Disk arrays can be connected to host systems through multiple paths. To detect the various paths to a disk, DMP uses a mechanism that is specific to each supported array. DMP can also differentiate between different enclosures of a supported array that are connected to the same host system.
The multi-pathing policy that DMP uses depends on the characteristics of the disk array.
DMP supports the following standard array types:
Table:
An array policy module (APM) may define array types to DMP in addition to the standard types for the arrays that it supports.
Veritas InfoScale uses DMP metanodes (DMP nodes) to access disk devices connected to the system. For each disk in a supported array, DMP maps one node to the set of paths that are connected to the disk. Additionally, DMP associates the appropriate multi-pathing policy for the disk array with the node.
Figure: How DMP represents multiple physical paths to a disk as one node shows how DMP sets up a node for a disk in a supported disk array.
DMP implements a disk device naming scheme that allows you to recognize to which array a disk belongs.
Figure: Example of multi-pathing for a disk enclosure in a SAN environment shows an example where two paths, vmhba1:C0:T0:L0 and vmhba2:C0:T0:L0, exist to a single disk in the enclosure, but VxVM uses the single DMP node, enc0_0, to access it.