System information

You can find some information about modifying claim rules in Appendix B, “Managing Storage Paths and
Multipathing Plugins,” on page 79.
For detailed descriptions of the commands available to manage PSA, see the vSphere Command-Line Interface
Installation and Reference Guide.
Viewing the Paths Information
Use the vSphere Client to determine which SATP and PSP the ESX/ESXi host uses for a specific storage device
and the status of all available paths for this storage device. You can access the path information from both, the
Datastores and Devices views. For datastores, you review the paths that connect to the device the datastore is
deployed on.
The path information includes the SATP assigned to manage the device, the path selection policy (PSP), and
a list of paths with their physical characteristics, such as an adapter and target each path uses, and the status
of each path. The following path status information can appear:
Active
Paths available for issuing I/O to a LUN. A single or multiple working paths
currently used for transferring data are marked as Active (I/O).
NOTE For hosts that run ESX/ESXi 3.5 or earlier, the term active means the only
path that the host is using to issue I/O to a LUN.
Standby
The path is operational and can be used for I/O if active paths fail.
Disabled
The path is disabled and no data can be transferred.
Broken
The software cannot connect to the disk through this path.
If you are using the Fixed path policy, you can see which path is the preferred path. The preferred path is
marked with an asterisk (*) in the Preferred column.
View Datastore Paths
Use the vSphere Client to review the paths that connect to storage devices the datastores are deployed on.
Procedure
1 Log in to the vSphere Client and select a server from the inventory panel.
2 Click the Configuration tab and click Storage in the Hardware panel.
3 Click Datastores under View.
4 From the list of configured datastores, select the datastore whose paths you want to view or configure.
The Details panel shows the total number of paths being used to access the device and whether any of
them are broken or disabled.
5 Click Properties > Manage Paths to open the Manage Paths dialog box.
You can use the Manage Paths dialog box to enable or disable your paths, set multipathing policy, and
specify the preferred path.
Chapter 6 Managing ESX/ESXi Systems That Use SAN Storage
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