Adding to my other discussion where I described my testing/configuration between VMware native multipathing and PowerPath/ve, I completed more comprehensive testing between the two products and wanted to highlight it here (and see if others are seeing similar resuls).

I performed this latest round of testing in another one of our data centers with both EMC (DMX and CLARIION) and HP storage.  We have a range of between 2 and 30 to 35 VM's per hosts and run them between 40 and 90% (average is ~ 70%) all the time.  When I installed and tried to configure NMP the best I could, we didn't really see a performance improvement (over no multipathing) since we needed to keep updating the system when VMachines moved or changed - maybe that's the biggest headache.  But when we pulled native MP out and put in PowerPath we immediately saw at least a 20% jump.  we hadn't even configured it yet.  And now that we've tweaked it I think we're seeing over 33 or 34% better performance.  We're even thinking that when we upgrade to VMax's later this year we will beable to use fewer HBAs since Powerpath will take care of load spreading.  Now if we could just get EMC and VMware to change their licensing of PowerPath/ve from vsphere enterprise plus to include enterprise too, I'd bee much happier!!!

Has anybody else seen this type of improvement?