One of the strange things about VMware’s vSphere product is the number of versions VMware plan to release and the functionality built into each version. I for one find it more than a little odd why the Advanced version should support a higher number of processor cores than the Enterprise version, 12 as opposed to Enterprises 6, whilst Enterprise has DRS and Advanced does not.
Another of these oddities is the lack of third party multipathing support in any version other than Enterprise Plus. Whilst VMware does offer its own basic multipathing features for virtual machines in all versions of vSphere, APIs in vSphere 4 (Enterprise Plus version) add more advanced multipathing software offered by storage vendors.
Although VMware has never had problems dealing with high I/O as VMware raises the bar on performance yet again with the release of vSphere 4 more and more organisations will be considering placing even larger workloads in a virtual environment. This will in turn inevatibly place an increased focus upon disk subsystems, in particular on disk I/O, throughput and latency. Recently however, VMware took a big leap forward in this area in regards to EMC’s announcement of PowerPath/VE.
EMC has been shipping PowerPath (advanced MPIO software) for many, many years. There are literally hundreds of thousands of licensed copies out there. Whilst many think of PowerPath as a EMC only product PowerPath supports virtually every operating system, and arrays other than just EMC’s.
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