Great study of multipathing and vSphere…

This came across my path yesterday and is awesome…    At a customer, someone did their own testing of PowerPath/VE relative to NMP as they refreshed their EVA to an EMC VMAX.

I want to highlight, EMC absolutely supports, and loves the NMP RR behavior, so it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that the whole vStorage pluggable storage architecture gave us an opportunity to innovate and develop a “best” option over the “good” option of NMP round robin.

From the post:

“…it can be argued whether PowerPath provides benefits, but most people I have talked to in the real world swear that PowerPath is brilliant. But let’s face it, it HAS to be brilliant to justify the cost per socket. Before tallying up all my sockets and asking someone to write a check, I needed to do my own due diligence. There aren’t many comprehensive PowerPath VE vs. Round Robin papers out there, so I needed to create my own.

My assumption was that I’d see a slight performance edge on PowerPath VE, but not enough to justify the cost. Part of this prejudice comes from hearing the other storage guys out there say there’s no need for vendor specific SATP / PSP’s since VMware NMP is so great these days. Here’s hoping there’s no massive check to write! By the way, if you prefer to skip the beautiful full color screen shots, go ahead and scroll down to the scorecard for the results”

http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2011/10/03/powerpath-ve-versus-round-robin-on-vmax-round-1/

Comments

[BrandonJRiley]

Thanks for the kind words.

I read your post on NMP RR and iooperationslimit=1. Do you have any test data on VMAX? As you can tell from my testing, my PP numbers are much better than RR at 1000. When I take it to 1, the gap disappears. But I understand from your posts and Duncan's that things would be different on multiple hosts, with multiple LUN's.

Unfortunately I am running into time constraints, and I don't think I'll be able to do a huge test with several hosts. Just checking with you to see if there is any data out there. I've got to make a decision really soon on this PPVE purchase.