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	<title>Maartendamen&#039;s blog &#187; pathing</title>
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		<title>VMware vSphere default pathing policy</title>
		<link>http://www.maartendamen.com/2009/11/vmware-vsphere-default-pathing-policy/</link>
		<comments>http://www.maartendamen.com/2009/11/vmware-vsphere-default-pathing-policy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Maarten</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[VMware vSphere]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eva]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hp]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pathing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[san]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[storage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vmware]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vsphere]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.maartendamen.com/?p=7</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I am currently building a new vSphere farm at my company. This also includes the storage part, which can become a load of work: First you have to fix up the physical cabling; next, you have to setup up the zoning; up next you have to present the virtual disks to the VMware hosts. Last [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I am currently building a new vSphere farm at my company. This also includes the storage part, which can become a load of work:</p>
<ul>
<li>First you have to fix up the physical cabling;</li>
<li>next, you have to setup up the zoning;</li>
<li>up next you have to present the virtual disks to the VMware hosts.</li>
</ul>
<p>Last but not least you need to take care of pathing for your presented virtual disks. For our HP EVA SAN, vSphere defaults to the &#8220;Most Recently Used (VMware)&#8221; policy.<br />
In the past we used to manually load balance using fixed paths. <span id="more-7"></span>This was mainly because the round robin policy mechanism was still in an EXPERIMENTAL status.<br />
The round robin policy offers great advantages over the default MRU policy:</p>
<ul>
<li>The HP EVA offers ALUA (Asymmetrical Logical Unit Access). ALUA allows a LUN to be accessed via its primary path (via the owning Storage Processor) and via an asymmetrical path (via the not-owning Storage Processor) I/O to the not-owning Storage Processor or not-optimized path  comes with a performance penalty because the I/O has to be transmitted over the internal connection between the storage processors which does not have much bandwidth;</li>
<li>using ALUA in combination with Round Robin will load balance the I/O&#8217;s over the most optimized paths for that LUN;</li>
<li>the load is balanced between the two optimized paths rather then the most recently used path (as with the MRU policy).</li>
</ul>
<p>Setting the pathing policy for each individual LUN can become quite a job. Good thing there is a way to set the default pathing policy for new discovered LUN&#8217;s using &#8220;esxcli&#8221;</p>
<p><em>esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp -–psp VMW_PSP_RR –-satp &lt;Storage Array Type&gt;</em></p>
<p>To figure out the storage array type for your virtual disk, right click a LUN and select &#8220;Manage Paths&#8221; (the screenshot highlights the Storage Array Type.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-8" title="vmware_roundrobin" src="http://www.maartendamen.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/vmware_roundrobin.png" alt="vmware_roundrobin" width="726" height="231" /></p>
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