Any experience on MPIO with CA-EVA?

[Fred van Zwieten_1]

I noticed HP has released MPIO drivers for EVA. The included readme says nothing about CA-EVA. Does anyone has any experience with this? I would love to ditch Secure Path.

[Derek_31 · Accepted solution]

According to my HP rep the MPIO driver is extremely basic and nothing you want to use in production. It does not provide for fail-back, load balancing and other features.

From what I gather the 'dumbing down' of the MPIO driver is due to marketing and not a technical limitation. I guess they don't want to give up the revenue from Secure Path.

I've heard that HP doesn't plan on making the MPIO driver on par with Secure Path for the EVA 3000/5000.

I've been very disappointed with HP's support of Windows Server 2003 features, and this just about does it for me. EMC had MPIO support about a year ago for the Symmetrix.

[Sheldon Smith]

FWIW, I came across the Microsoft technical paper "Highly Available Storage: Multipathing and the Microsoft MPIO Driver Architecture" just this morning.

As I read it, the MPIO driver package simply reports which paths are up and which are down. It still requires the vendor software Device Specific Module (DSM) to tell it how to handle load balancing, failover and failback.