Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware has an operating mode which enables the pooling of locally attached devices such as SSDs at the ESXi host layer. The aggregation of the local devices is called SmartPool. From the SmartPool, you can provision SmartDisks to be used as caching areas by SmartIO in the ESXi guests running Veritas InfoScale. By dividing the SmartPool into several SmartDisks, you can share the caching storage across multiple virtual machines. Using SmartPools gives you the flexibility to move virtual machines across ESXi hosts while SmartIO caching is in progress. Although each host has its own SSD, you can configure each host to have a comparable view of the SmartDisk. When you use vMotion to migrate the virtual machines that have Veritas InfoScale running, SmartIO shuts down the cache on the source node and restarts the cache on the target host. SmartIO caching stays online during the migration. You can dynamically resize the SmartPool by adding or removing storage devices to the SmartPool.

You can use this mode regardless of whether you are using DMP for VMware to manage storage multi-pathing in the host.

The SmartPool functionality is enabled by installing DMP for VMware in the ESXi host. For the SmartPool functionality, you do not need to have a separate license for DMP.

To use SmartIO in the ESXi guest, you must install Veritas InfoScale in the ESXi guest.

For more information, see the Veritas InfoScale Virtualization Guide for VMware ESXi.

If you plan to use DMP for VMware for multi-pathing in the host, you must have the appropriate license.