Whitepaper: EMC Performance Optimization for VMware Enabled by EMC PowerPath/VE

Abstract:  This white paper is an overview of the tested features and perforamnce enhancing technologies of EMC PowerPath/VE 5.4.  The performance and reliability of EMC PowerPath/VE are compared to teh performance of VMWare Native Multipathing (NMP) technology including the MRU (most recently used), fixed, and round-robin methods.

Yellow-Bricks.com, a blog about virtualization, with a strong focus on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, posted the following excerpt on Oct 30, 2009:

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!