The XtremIO X2 array supports vSphere Native Multipathing (NMP) technology. Multipathing increases efficiency of sending data over redundant hardware paths that connect PowerEdge servers to XtremIO X2 storage. Benefits include alternating I/O by using round-robin to optimize use of the hardware paths and more evenly distribute the data. Also, if any component along the storage path fails, then NMP resets the connection and passes I/O using an alternate path. For the XtremIO X2 array, we followed these best practices:
- Retained the default selection of round-robin as the native path selection policy (PSP) on the XtremIO X2 volumes that are presented to the ESXi host
- Changed the NMP round-robin path switching frequency from the default value (1,000 I/O packets) to 1
