Specifications

Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013

Best Practices and Recommendations

Standard 10/100, 1 Gb, or 10 GbE do not support FCoE. FCoE runs on versions of Ethernet that

have been improved to provide low latency, quality of service, guaranteed delivery, and other

functionality traditionally associated with channel interfaces.

Fibre Channel, OM3, and OM4 cabling are suitable for FCoE and 10 GbE.

Multipath I/O

Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) is a framework provided by Microsoft for developing multipath solutions

that contain hardware-specific information required to enhance connectivity for storage arrays. In other

words, MPIO increases the availability of storage resources by providing support for using multiple data

paths to a storage device. MPIO uses host-based software, called device-specific modules (DSMs), to

provide this multipath support. MPIO is protocol-independent and can be used with FC, iSCSI, and Serial

Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces in Windows Server 2012. MPIO in Windows Server 2012 provides the

following enhanced features:

 PowerShell management and configuration: MPIO can be configured using PowerShell as an

alternative to MPCLAIM.exe.

 Heterogeneous HBA usage with MPIO: Heterogeneous HBA types now can be used together

with non-boot virtual disks only.

 Support for MPIO with multiport-SAS enclosures: The use of MPIO with data volumes on a

multiport-SAS enclosure is now supported.

An MPIO/multipath driver cannot work effectively until it discovers, enumerates, and configures into a

logical group the different devices that the operating system sees through redundant adapters. Figure 15

shows that without any multipath driver, the same devices through different physical paths would appear

as different devices, leaving room for data corruption.

Figure 15: The use of multipathing software to correctly identify paths and devices