Microsoft Multipathing I/O (MPIO) & iSCSI on Win7

Hello all,

My first post here, but have been a keen follower of Toms Hardware since the days of the AMD K6!

Anyhow, down to business.

I've been spending a lot of my free time playing with storage (SAN/NAS/DAS) and the associated network technologies. I have been using Microsoft's Multipathing I/O (MPIO) with iSCSI on my windows XP 64bit desktop connecting to an open-E based SAN (these are brilliant BTW). I've enjoyed the increased performance (peaking out at around 150-170MB/s) whist connecting to an single iSCSI target consisting of two SATA 1TB disks in RAID1. This uses the two onbard NIC's in my desktop, each set to a different subnet and the same dual NIC configuration on the Open-E SAN. All is peachey and fine!

Then I consider upgrading to Win 7.......guess what?........ "MPIO is only supported on M$ server platforms". Well excuse me! I am running it on a desktop platform that pre-dates both Win 7 and Vista. Why on earth would they exclude it!! They could at least offer it on their "professional" products for those with high performance requirements, but without the deep pockets for dedicated hardware iSCSI HBA's.

This sounds like a very bad decision? And I do think this is a concious decision, rather than an "error"....

Has anyone else any feelings/thoughts/frustrations on the matter?

Best regards

TFZ

Well in all honesty, the vast majority of people who would have a home SAN, open source or otherwise would most likely have Win7 Enterprise or Ultimate so I don't really see the issue.

And that's the idea MS has been following for a long time. lots of "advanced" features weren't available in XP Home. In Vista they just added more granularity with the different SKUs but still the same philosophy.

I can say for sure that Enterprise and Ultimate support iSCSI. I wouldn't expect the Home version to.