DMP provides an advanced multi-pathing solution for Hyper-V environments.

Multi-pathing software provides the intelligence necessary to manage multiple I/O paths between a server and a storage subsystem. This becomes even more important in virtual environments, where a single physical server hosts multiple operating system instances and applications. Loss of access to storage due to an HBA, cable, or controller failure can cause widespread impact, with potential for greater disruption than would be the case with a single physical system.

In virtual environments, a hypervisor separates the VMs from the physical hardware, making it difficult to directly map virtual host bus adapters (HBAs) in the guest to the physical HBAs that service the physical host, and to therefore have a true multi-pathing solution in the guest. Installing the required InfoScale product in the parent partition allows for true multi-pathing, providing failover, and load-balancing to the LUNs that host the VMs in the child partition.

Most multi-pathing solutions are developed by storage vendors for their specific brand of storage and, as such, generally cannot service the many types of storage that can exist in today's heterogeneous SAN environments. In contrast, DMP is a truly heterogeneous solution. DMP fully integrates with the Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) architecture. DMP includes several device-specific modules (DSMs) which provide array-specific support for a wide variety of the most popular array families available.