My colleague Lee Dilworth, SRM/BC-DR Specialist, pointed me out to an excellent whitepaper by EMC. This whitepaper describes the difference between Powerpath/VE and MRU, Fixed and Round Robin.
Key results:
- Powerpath/VE provides superior load-balancing performance across multiple paths using FC or iSCSI.
- Powerpath/VE seamlessly integrates and takes control of all device I/O, path selection, and failover without the need for additional configuration.
- VMware NMP requires that certain configuration parameters be specified to achieve improved performance.
I recommend reading the whitepaper to get a good understanding of where a customer would benefit from using EMC Powerpath/VE. The whitepaper gives a clear picture of the load balancing capabilities of Powerpath/VE compared to MRU, Fixed and Round Robin. It also shows that there’s less manual configuration to be done when using Powerpath/VE, and as just revealed by Chad Sakac on twitter an integrated patching solution will be introduced with ESX/vCenter 4.0 Update 1!
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide
you might be interested to know that i needed to set a scratch location in order to install the powerpath psp on ESXi. I got a “no space left on device” error in vMA…
Ας i am the process of buying a emc clariion cx40 for our datacenter, it happened to ask our emc(official) salesman about the need of buying powerpath/ve. His opinion was that as far our needs are not very high, its not necessary to buy powerpath/ve( its licensed per core) and that the internal mechanism of vsphere 4 for load balancing and failover works very well..
Just to be accurate, the correct model is cx4-120 and not cx40..as i wrote above.
The need would be based on business requirements not on a sales persons opinion in my eyes.
@neo76: If your Fiat brings you from A to B in a way you like you don’t need to buy a Mercedes.
And oh my god, you’ve never had such an upgrade.
But… If your Mercedes can’t cope up up with your needs you need to pimp your enviroment the Lamborgini style