ESX Storage Architecture

So something else interesting from yesterday is it sounds like big changes are coming to ESX storage architecture in the back end. It's still a ways off but it could finally mean Power Path coming to ESX as well as a lot of other storage tools being able to be written and work with Virtual Infrastructure. Power Path has been a major pain point for us. Our storage team requires it on all SAN connected hosts. We worked around this from some rather expensive script writing by EMC. This really seems like a script that EMC should provide customers work around the Power Path not working issue. Issue: When a Storage Processor event occurs such as a flare code upgrade or SP failure/replacement happens, all the load is pushed to the remaining SP. In a Power Path connected world, Power Path manages the trespass and moves the LUN back to the preferred SP. So at this point all ESX hosts are forced to one SP. Solution: We engaged EMC to write a perl script that works of the navi management server. This enumerates all the VMWare LUNS and checks the "default SP" If the current owner is not the default SP, the script issues a trespass and moves the LUN to the correct SP. Seems simple enough. But by the time we included all the features we wanted the functional spec was two pages long. Some examples are exit codes, configuration files, interactive/silent mode, etc...