DMP lets you to turn off I/O through a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) controller or the array port of a storage processor so that you can perform administrative operations. This feature can be used when you perform maintenance on HBA controllers on the host, or array ports that are attached to disk arrays supported by SF. I/O operations to the HBA controller or the array port can be turned back on after the maintenance task is completed. You can accomplish these operations using the vxdmpadm command.

For Active/Active type disk arrays, when you disable the I/O through an HBA controller or array port, the I/O continues on the remaining paths. For Active/Passive type disk arrays, if disabling I/O through an HBA controller or array port resulted in all primary paths being disabled, DMP will failover to secondary paths and I/O will continue on them.

After the administrative operation is over, use the vxdmpadm command to re-enable the paths through the HBA controllers or array ports.

You can also perform certain reconfiguration operations dynamically online.