Managing Third-Party Storage Arrays

VMware partners and customers can optimize performance of their storage arrays in conjunction with VMware vSphere by using VMware PSA (pluggable storage architecture). The esxcli storage core namespace manages VMware PSA and the esxcli storage nmp namespace manages the VMware NMP plug-in.

The vSphere Storage documentation discusses PSA functionality in detail and explains how to use the vSphere Web Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug-in (NMP), and third-party plug-ins.

This chapter uses the following acronyms.

Acronym	Meaning
PSA	Pluggable Storage Architecture
NMP	Native Multipathing Plug-in. Generic VMware multipathing module.
PSP	Path Selection Plug-in. Handles path selection for a given device.
SATP	Storage Array Type Plug-in. Handles path failover for a given storage array.