Symantec has announced Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware to help organizations improve storage I/O performance and availability for VMware vSphere when customers move their tier one applications to virtual platforms with its better visibility and management of the underlying storage and improved availability of the virtual machine and applications. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware automatically routes data to an available path if a failure occurs and then effortlessly restores the failed paths as they become available.
Symantec has announced Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware to help organizations improve storage I/O performance and availability for VMware vSphere when customers move their tier one applications to virtual platforms with its better visibility and management of the underlying storage and improved availability of the virtual machine and applications. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware automatically routes data to an available path if a failure occurs and then effortlessly restores the failed paths as they become available.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware aids companies managing virtualized I/O paths through multiple algorithms and intelligent load balancing from inside the VMware environment. In addition, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware easily integrates with VMware vCenter or by a command-line interface, providing administrative and monitoring capabilities within the VMware environment.
Symantec has also announced an agreement with NetApp to resell Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware. This allows organizations to receive a complete solution from NetApp as they build out their storage infrastructure.
Organizations now need higher performance and tighter SLAs for availability. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware meets these requirements by 
providing comprehensive storage optimization capabilities to block-based SAN storage environments including automated priority based I/O scheduling. As the amount of virtualized storage increases, conflicts might arise, which can result in failed paths. Restoration of these paths are often complicated due to poor visibility into either the virtual environment or the physical SAN. This can result in costly errors. The load-balancing and management capabilities of Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware helps to improve I/O connectivity performance and reliability, by providing increased availability for organizations to meet business objectives of virtualizing mission-critical applications.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware improves I/O performance by distributing I/O operations across all available paths according to default or administrator specified load balancing policies. With it, administrators can:
- Centralize management across disparate hardware to deploy and manage storage, gain visibility into SAN attached VMware storage from a VMware environment, and maintain resilient connectivity
- Select between multiple policies depending on the characteristics of the I/O workload, SAN layout and performance needs while keeping systems on-line
- Distribute I/O across multiple paths for maximum performance
- Increase storage hardware choices to reduce costs and achieve the performance and availability needed to virtualize applications.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware provides better visibility and reporting by allowing both the storage and the server administrator to see key attributes inside the SAN. This gives administrators the ability to make more informed decisions on storage placement of virtual machine guests, such as, ensuring the storage tier is appropriate for the virtual machine workload.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware helps organizations:
- Solve key challenges around device naming by using device specific identifiers in the device names, making them more meaningful and consistent, thereby reducing errors
- Use the familiar VMware vCenter interface to gain visibility into the performance of the storage subsystem
- Monitor the storage subsystem health from the vCenter add-in
- Gain immediate visibility during performance troubleshooting with real-time storage statistics
Data availability very important as more business-critical workloads are moving to virtualized environments. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware automatically re-routes I/O requests to an alternate path when infrastructure component failure occurs. When a failed path returns to service, Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware restores the original path configuration automatically, without the need of an administrator.
Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware:
- Intelligently and proactively determines if a storage path is failing before I/O is sent down the path, providing maximum availability and performance
- Provides fast failure and protection against storage path failure, including restoring of the path automatically
- Reduces errors and increases efficiency with centralized storage path management
Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is now available through the channel or Symantec and from NetApp in the summer. Estimated pricing starts at $900 USD per processor. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is a stand-alone product for the ESX hypervisor through the VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) framework.
