Can someone explain what NCM does in a more understandable way?

[Koobster]

So I've read up the concept and VMware integration guide and I haven't completely comprehended what exactly NCM does so I can explain to my customers.

I understand NCM sets your psp/mpio to round robin for iscsi and fc but for the NCM part, how exactly does it benefit in terms of iscsi Management? I understand if you had multiple nimbles in a group that it could maybe use ncm to manage it's paths but in terms of a single nimble array with 2 port iscsi hba on each controller.. how does it benefit?

I was told that if I installed NCM on my esxi host that all I would have to do was add the VM iscsi iqn to nimble and it would discovery automatically. It didn't, I had to add the discovery IP to dynamic discovery on the esxi like any other storage arrays.

What I'm asking for is for a easier explanation of what NCM does for a single nimble array vs multiple nimble.arrays in a group so I can better comprehend and understand to better explain.

[Roland Kudelic]

Hi
In the release notes Nimble Connection Manager for VMware you can read this sentence:

"NCM provides resilient, automated multi-pathing and connection management for VMware environments, even for single array groups."

Works like a charm.
Cheers
Roland