Chapter 3. Setting Up DM-Multipath

Edit the /etc/multipath.conf file by commenting out the following lines at the top of the file. This section of the configuration file, in its initial state, blacklists all devices. You must comment it out to enable multipathing.

devnode_blacklist {
        devnode "*"
}

After commenting out those lines, this section appears as follows.

# devnode_blacklist {
#        devnode "*"
# }

The default settings for DM-Multipath are compiled in to the system and do not need to be explicitly set in the /etc/multipath.conf file.

The default value of path_grouping_policy is set to failover, so in this example you do not need to change the default value. For information on changing the values in the configuration file to something other than the defaults, see Chapter 4, The DM-Multipath Configuration File.

The initial defaults section of the configuration file configures your system that the names of the multipath devices are are of the form mpathn; without this setting, the names of the multipath devices would be aliased to the WWID of the device.

Save the configuration file and exit the editor.

Execute the following commands:

modprobe dm-multipath
service multipathd start
multipath -v2

The multipath -v2 command prints out multipathed paths that show which devices are multipathed, but only for the devices created by this command. If the command does yield any output, you can check your multipath devices as follows:

For further information on the multipath command and its output, see Section 5.1, “Multipath Command Output”, see Section 5.2, “Multipath Queries with multipath Command”, and see Section 5.3, “Multipath Command Options”.

Execute the following command to ensure sure that the multipath daemon starts on bootup:

chkconfig multipathd on