Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) enables hardware vendors to create interoperable multipathing solutions that increase reliability, interoperability, and high-speed data access. Multipathing, the ability of a system to use more than one read/write path to a storage device, is a high availability solution that provides fault tolerance against single point of failure in hardware components. Multipathing can also provide load balancing of I/O traffic.

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.2 supports MPIO for block storage on Windows Storage Server 2008. It also includes Microsoft iSCSI Device Specific Module (DSM), which is works with SPC-3 compliant targets.

Note
When used with Microsoft iSCSI Software Target, MPIO is not supported for iSCSI initiators when the initiators are members of a failover cluster.

You can develop a device-specific module (DSM) to integrate iSCSI Software Target MPIO with your hardware. If you plan to ship an MPIO solution, you must:

MPIO can be installed as an additional feature through Server Manager.

To install MPIO
  1. Open Server Manager. Click Start, and then click Server Manager.

  2. Click Features.

  3. Click Add Features.

  4. Under Features, select Multipath I/O, and then click Next.

  5. Click Install.

See Also