Which technology increases availability from a virtualization host to a storage device by providing multiple paths?

Which technology increases availability from a virtualization host to a storage device by providing multiple paths?

• A. Trunking
• B. Multipathing
• C. Link aggregation
• D. VLANs

Answer: (B)

Multipathing increases availability by creating multiple I/O paths from the virtualization host to the storage device. With multipathing, the host uses more than one physical path and a path-management layer continuously monitors path health, automatically failing over to a healthy path if one path drops. This not only protects against a single path failure but can also spread I/O across several paths to improve performance modestly. In virtualization contexts, this often involves multiple HBAs and fabric paths to a storage array that exposes multiple controllers, with a storage-aware driver or MPIO software handling the logic behind the scenes. Trunking and link aggregation are network techniques aimed at bonding links to increase bandwidth or resilience for network traffic, not specifically for maintaining storage access, while VLANs are about segmenting network traffic and do not address storage path availability.

Multipathing increases availability by creating multiple I/O paths from the virtualization host to the storage device. With multipathing, the host uses more than one physical path and a path-management layer continuously monitors path health, automatically failing over to a healthy path if one path drops. This not only protects against a single path failure but can also spread I/O across several paths to improve performance modestly. In virtualization contexts, this often involves multiple HBAs and fabric paths to a storage array that exposes multiple controllers, with a storage-aware driver or MPIO software handling the logic behind the scenes. Trunking and link aggregation are network techniques aimed at bonding links to increase bandwidth or resilience for network traffic, not specifically for maintaining storage access, while VLANs are about segmenting network traffic and do not address storage path availability.