I am finishing up an installation of an EMC Clariion CX4 SAN. One of the final steps of the installation is to configure PowerPath/VE on the ESXi hosts. PowerPath/VE is EMC’s multipathing extension module for VMware (and Hyper-V), designed to replace the Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) for increased I/O performance and failover management. To simplify and automate the installation of PowerPath/VE, I decided to use VMware Update Manager (VUM) to push the extension to the ESXi 4.x hosts in the environment.
The process of setting up an additional VUM patch repository to host PowerPath/VE (and other 3rd party extensions such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v) is pretty straight forward. 3rd party extensions are supported in VUM beginning with vSphere 4.0 Update 1. Chad Sakac has posted a great video guide on YouTube that covers the setup:
I opted to use the tomcat installation on the environment’s vCenter server to host the PowerPath/VE repository. To accomplish this, I simply created a new directory in the tomcat root directory. The default path for the root directory on a vSphere vCenter Server is “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps” (or C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps on a 64-bit installation).
I created a directory named ‘depot’ and within that directory created a PowerPathVE folder. I extracted the contents of the VUM folder from the PowerPath .zip file that I downloaded from http://powerlink.emc.com. A screenshot of the directory is below:
PowerPath/VE Depot Directory Tree
After creating the directory for the patch repository, I simply added an Extension Repository to VMware Update Manager as Chad shows in his video. I would like to call out one caveat – Because vCenter may not listen on standard HTTP/HTTPS ports, I used 
https://vcenter.domain.local:8443/depot/PowerPathVE/index.xml as the path to the source.
VUM Patch Source
Once PowerPath was added to an Extension Baseline in VUM, I simply had to scan my hosts for updates and remediate. Installation of PowerPath/VE requires the host to be in Maintenance Mode and concludes with a reboot. Pretty simple.
Then all you have to do is fight through an overly-complex licensing setup (seriously, a 112 page PDF on how to install licenses???), a bit of configuration, and you are multi-pathing with the best of them. If you are interested in learning more about PowerPath/VE, start with this whitepaper: EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere Best Practices Planning. For a bit of real-world insight into the performance increase you might see with PowerPath/VE, check out this blog post from Eric Sloof: Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE.
Update – 3/27/09: VMware published a Knowledge Base article on this procedure a few weeks after I wrote this post. You can find it in article 1018740.
Related posts:
5 Responses to “Installing PowerPath/VE using VMware Update Manager”
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
Hello, and thank you for visiting VMtoday. My name is Josh Townsend. I am a technology professional with a strong background in VMware Virtualization, Storage, and Microsoft technologies. I am a Sr. Systems Administrator at Tiber Creek Consulting in Fairfax, VA, and hold several technical certifications, including VMware Certified Professional. I am also a 2010 VMware vExpert.
I am also leader of the Washington DC Metro Area VMware User Group (VMUG).
The opinions expressed on this site are my own and may not reflect the views of my employer, VMware, or any other party unless otherwise stated.
Please feel free to follow me on Twitter
@joshuatownsend
Joshua,
Am I correct in saying that this does not handle any of the additional configuration steps? eg, setting existing datastores and new datastore to use PowerPath rather the the default of Fixed or MRU.
David
David – That is correct. This only installs the PowerPath/VE modules. The licensing, activation, and configuration is all done using the rpowermt CLI, and the vCLI or vMA to manage claim rules and the like. A bit of scripting could probably be used to automate changing settings on existing datastores or adding new datastores if needed.
Josh
[...] Tripwire's Jim Johnson exec of the year | Silicon Forest – OregonLive.com 2 Tweets Installing PowerPath/VE using VMware Update Manager | VMtoday I am finishing up an installation of an EMC Clariion CX4 SAN. One of the final steps of the [...]
Hello,
I tried this exact same procedure for vsphere 4.1 and the EMC powerpath 5.4 SP1 software. I can validate the URL with no problem (https://localhost:8443/depot/PowerpathVE5.4_SP1/index.xml).
When I go to download in vcenter, it gets to 20% then fails with the following error code:
Web sites: https://www.vmware.com/PatchManagementSystem/patchmanagement hosting the patch definitions and patches cannot be accessed or have no patch data. Check the Internet connectivity.
I have no idea why it’s going out to VMware for a local website repository. Any ideas!?!?
I am guessing that the problem is related to the lack of PowerPath/VE support for vSphere 4.1. PP/VE is supported for running on ESX 4.1, but not pushing updates via VMware Update Manager (VUM). Chad Sakac of EMC fame covers the compatibility bit here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/07/vsphere-41-cross-emc-support-whats-the-goodbadugly.html