Viewing and Managing Paths

When you start your ESXi host or rescan your storage adapter, the host discovers all physical paths to storage devices available to the host. Based on a set of claim rules, the host determines which multipathing module, the NMP, HPP, or an MPP, owns the paths to a particular device.

The module that owns the device becomes responsible for managing the multipathing support for the device. By default, the host performs a periodic path evaluation every five minutes and assigns unclaimed paths to the appropriate module.

For the paths managed by the NMP module, a second set of claim rules is used. These rules assign an SATP and PSP modules to each storage device and determine which Storage Array Type Policy and Path Selection Policy to apply.

Use the vSphere Client to view the Storage Array Type Policy and Path Selection Policy assigned to a specific storage device. You can also check the status of all available paths for this storage device. If needed, you can change the default Path Selection Policy using the client.

To change the default multipathing module or SATP, modify claim rules using the vSphere CLI.

You can find some information about modifying claim rules in Using Claim Rules.