the servers have 2 hba's. powerpath will not work for optimal failover and load balancing without licence.

I dont think we have a native MPIO DSM in windows 2003. 2003 always needed a third party DSM to be installed for multipathing.

What I did for my customer was install the Powerpath basic for him to do the multipathing.

Anand Baghel.

you are correct, basic powerpath will not be an optimal solution here, but we do not have a lot of choice. you can consider upgrading to windows 2008 if possible.

Anand.

Windows Native MPIO starts from Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2. it's not available in Win 2003. I also recommend you upgrade your OS or using PowerPath

Since PowerPath version 4.6.1 PowerPath has used the Microsoft MPIO subsystem for multipathing on all versions of Windows (2003 and up)

EMC doesn`t have MPIO DSM for Windows 2003, you can use PowerPath with license or without license with limited functionality. But if you use iSCSI connection to VMAX, you can use native MPIO in Windows iSCSI Initiator.