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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Multipath I/O (MPIO)

Using multiple physical paths between a host and storage for redundancy and load balancing, managed by multipathing software.

Definition

Windows MPIO, Linux DM-Multipath and VMware Native Multipathing Plugin manage paths with policies such as round robin, fixed or most recently used. ALUA tells hosts which paths are optimized.

Example

A Windows server uses MPIO round robin across two iSCSI NICs on separate subnets.

Exam tip

For iSCSI, use MPIO rather than NIC teaming for storage path redundancy.

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