Patent ID: 8495255

Claim:
A computer program product for processing communications between a host processor and a plurality of devices connected to the host processor by an input/output processing system, comprising a non-transitory storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method comprising: receiving, by the host processor, physical configuration information including identification of a location of each physical endpoint connected to the host processor and a plurality of communication paths associated with each physical endpoint, wherein the host processor includes a Dynamic Channel Path Management (DCM) cluster; iteratively interrogating, by the host processor, each physical endpoint by sending at least one message to each physical endpoint on each of the plurality of communication paths in response to receiving the physical configuration information, the at least one message requesting identification of a logical entity at the endpoint, and receiving logical configuration information identifying the logical entity; generating a data collection accessible by the host processor, the data collection including the physical configuration information and the logical configuration information for each logical entity, and identification of the plurality of communication paths to each logical entity; and selecting one or more paths of the plurality of communication paths based on path availability for executing an input/output (I/O) operation, wherein selecting includes creating a host policy for determining a number of static paths for availability and a number of managed paths for performance to be associated with each logical entity.