Patent ID: 8640138

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining an association of processing system identifiers with resources, including a first and second resources; receiving a request from requesting processing system software in a host for use of the first resource that provides access to the second resource, and wherein the request includes a submitted processing system identifier, wherein the received request is associated with a path group identifier provided by the requesting processing system software; determining whether the path group identifier associated with the request matches a path group identifier associated with the first and second resources; determining whether the submitted processing system identifier is one of the processing system identifiers associated with the first and second resources; and providing the requesting processing system software access to the first resource that the processing system uses to access the second resource in response to determining that the submitted processing system identifier is one of the processing system identifiers associated with the first and second resources and determining that the path group identifier associated with the request matches the path group identifier associated with the first and second resources, wherein the first resource provides access to the second resource or an element identified by the second resource.