Please consider moving this question as-is (no need to recreate) to the proper forum for maximum visibility.  Questions written to the users' own "Discussions" space don't get the same amount of attention and can go unanswered for a long time.  You can do so by selecting "Move" under ACTIONS along the upper-right.  Then search for and select: "PowerPath".   To see the extent of what is and isn't available with an unlicensed installation of PowerPath, the following commands will provide the most insight:  From a LUN (device) perspective: powermt display dev=all  From an HBA perspective: powermt display  1) You will see: policy=BasicFailover  2) For all but 2 paths, under I/O Path > Mode: unlic (2 paths will show active)   An unlicensed installation of PowerPath will only provide/show active I/O for 2 paths from a single HBA and those 2 paths will only be a single path to SP A and SP B.  Therefore what does that mean from a failover/load-balancing perspective (or rather lack of)?  1) It will only actively use a single path to the current owner of the LUN even if for a single HBA you happen to have more than one path to each SP 2) Will only provide backend failover in case of an SP failure for instance (will trespass a LUN as needed - takes in consideration ALUA also) 3) Will NOT provide HBA failover (in consideration of more than one HBA) 4) As a consequence of the above, you therefore lose any (dynamic) load-balancing across multiple paths (via single or multiple HBA's to each LUN)   To answer your other question, if you do end up getting a license for PowerPath, on Unix you will need to manually set the policy.  It is occasionally an overlooked step; I've seen several installs where they add the license and never update (and save) the policy.  For example to apply to all devices managed by PowerPath:  1) powermt set policy=co dev=all  2) powermt display dev=all Simply to verify across all devices the following: - policy=co - *ALL* devices managed by PowerPath and all paths show active (and no longer unlic)  3) powermt save  On Windows it is automatically set to ClarOpt (co), but I still recommend the validation and save (which isn't automatic).   If you would like more information, in our knowledgebase the information is scattered in several articles.  I'll leave with you a search URL:  1) [URL]  2) You can also search for the PowerPath Administration Guide corresponding to the version (major.minor and OS) of PowerPath you are running on support.emc.com [URL]  3) There are also comments about PowerPath in the corresponding Host Connectivity Guide for the Unix OS you are running [URL]
Hi all,  In one of our systems we have CX3-20F EMC storage. It seems not to have powerpath license when checked. We haven't met any functional problem so far What can be the effect of not having it?  Besides if we install the license does it gets activated automatically. It seems our policy profile doesn' work because of this.  root[NAME]>/etc/emcpreg -list  unable to open license key file: No such file ordirectory  We got following logs during database installation..   Warning: license for CLARiiON storage systemsupport is missing or expired. Warning: license for CLARiiON storage systemsupport is missing or expired. Error: "co" is not a valid policy for CLARiiON storage systems with the installed license.  Thanks,
PowerPath License Missing in EMC