Youâre about to enter a world where creating a Virtual Machine hot-clone is done faster than powering it off. My former Capgemini colleagues, Ernst Cozijnsen and John van der Sluis recently implemented EMC PowerPath/VE, here's their story.
It took the guys in storage land a long time to deliver.... But finally it's there.... A really great kick-ass plug-in to boost your vSphere 4 storage performance through the roof.
In prior versions of ESX the Native Multi Pathing âNMPâ plug-in was available for balancing the storage load over different Fiber Channel HBAâs and storage paths to your storage array(s). Beside that itâs not really âMulti Pathingâ it had another major disadvantage of being able to stress your storage array in such a way it could crash. (Yes.. we know how it works and yes⌠we succeeded in this). This crashing didnât had much to do with ESX but more with how the storage arrays handle the different request coming in from the FA port and distributing the load across the storage processors inside the box.
If commands for e.g. LUN-A come in via 2 different FA ports on the array which all have their own storage processor, there needs to be a lot of âinter communicationâ between the storage CPUâs inside the box. For a normal environment this is no issue but when you start to stretch the limit this can and will cause major concerns. Therefore I have written this script.
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