Using Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) Solutions in a VMware environment means that the SFHA Solutions product runs in the operating system, inside the Virtual Machine (VM).

The SFHA Solutions product, such as Storage Foundation, does not run inside the VMware ESXi kernel or in the Hypervisor.

Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is a separate product from Symantec that performs storage multi-pathing at the ESXi Hypervisor layer.

See Introduction to using Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware.

Figure: Architecture overview shows an example of the high-level architecture diagram with Storage Foundation running in the VM.

Figure: I/O path from Virtual Machine to storage shows the I/O path from the Virtual Machine to the storage.

VMware has several different methods to allocate block storage to a virtual machine:

VMware must be configured to use Raw Device Mapping for certain features of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) to operate as they do in a physical server environment.

See When to use Raw Device Mapping and Symantec Storage Foundation.

Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) can be used in a Virtual Machine, either as a stand-alone product or as a component of another SFHA Solutions product. In either case, DMP does not perform multi-pathing in the VM. The VMware architecture presents the Virtual Machine as a single data path and the Hypervisor layer takes care of the multi-pathing. Technically, you could possibly configure the same disk, with raw device mapping, over two different host bus adapters to a virtual machine. The resulting configuration is not supported because it would run two multi-pathing solutions on top of each other.

Although DMP does not perform multi-pathing in the VM, DMP is an integral part of the data path of Storage Foundation products and cannot be disabled. DMP performs device management tasks such as device discovery and thin reclamation.

Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware is a separate product from Symantec that performs storage multi-pathing at the ESXi Hypervisor layer.

See the following web site for more information:

http://www.symantec.com/dynamic-multi-pathing-for-vmware

When DMP for VMware is used in the ESXi host, using DMP in the guest increases the visibility to the storage.

See About simplified management using Dynamic Multi-Pathing in the hypervisor and guest.