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Multipathing is a software solution that is implemented at the host-operating-system level. While multipathing is optional, it provides path redundancy, failover, and performance-enhancing capabilities. It is highly recommended to deploy the solution in any environment where availability and performance are critical.
Note: For this paper, native multipathing was used for NVMe/FC volumes and udev was used to control device persistence.
The main benefits of using an MPIO solution are:
The native Linux multipath solution is supported and bundled in most popular Linux distributions in use today. Because the software is widely and readily available at no additional cost, many administrators prefer it to other third-party solutions.
Only one multipath software solution should be enabled on the host.
Array-to-host connectivity best practices include:
For details, see the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for Linux.
To simplify deployment, the native Linux multipath software comes with default settings for an extensive list of storage models from different vendors including PowerStore. The default settings allow the software to work with PowerStore immediately. However, these settings might not be optimal for all situations and should be reviewed and modified if necessary.
The multipath daemon configuration file must be created on newly installed systems. A basic template on Linux can be copied to /etc/multipath.conf and used as a starting point. The location of this template file varies with different versions of Linux, but it typically resides in a branch on the /usr/share/doc directory tree. Dell Technologies recommends using the settings defined in the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for Linux. Any settings that are not defined explicitly in /etc/multipath.conf would assume the default values. The full list of settings (explicitly set and default values) can be obtained running the following command. The default settings generally work without any issues.
multipathd –k"show config"
For more information, see the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for Linux.
For ease of management, assign meaningful names (aliases) to the multipath devices. For example, create aliases that are based on the application type and environment that the device is in. The following snippet from multipath.conf assigns an alias of ora-asm-data-001 to the PowerStore LUN with WWN 368ccf098007e083b9cd450d71757def2.
For more information, see the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for Linux.
PowerStore supports Asymmetric Logic Unit Access (ALUA) for host access. This feature allows the host operating system to differentiate between optimized paths and nonoptimized paths.