When you install DMP in the hypervisor, DMP provides visibility into the I/O paths and performance. DMP provides information such as the active I/O policy, the number of paths, and the number of active/enabled paths. You can view real-time storage performance statistics directly within the vSphere Client. The datacenter view of DMP enables you to determine which storage arrays are attached to which ESXi servers. The datacenter view also provides I/O performance details at the VMDK level. This feature provides additional information that you can use to understand I/O loads within individual guests and the actual subcomponents of the disks assigned to the guests.

When you use Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware in the hypervisor, you can use the I/O statistics from DMP to evaluate the performance. You can identify any I/O bottlenecks in the guests. If you also have DMP running in the individual guests, you can correlate the I/O statistics to the particular guests.

When you determine a bottleneck or I/O performance issue, you can use the native VMware functionality to resolve the issues. Using DMP and VMware together, you can achieve the best performance. For example, you can use vMotion to move the storage from one datastore to another. This feature lets you more easily balance I/O load across the virtual machines.

VOM can aggregate the statistics over time. You can use VOM to analyze the trends so that you can use the statistics for capacity planning. You can determine to which datastores you should allocate new guests, based on the workflow and not solely on the space that is available.

To improve I/O performance using DMP, install DMP on VMware in the hypervisor.

See the Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing Installation Guide - VMware ESX.

To correlate the I/O statistics to the particular guests, install DMP in the guests as either standalone DMP for Linux or as a component of Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation High Availability, or Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability.

See the Installation Guide for your product.