Support for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) devices with Arctera InfoScale

Description

This article provides information about the support for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) devices with Arctera InfoScale. InfoScale has supported NVMe devices since the inception of NVMe protocol.

NVMe protocol is extended to support access to devices over the network. This is known as NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). NVMe-oF supports different network protocols

• RDMA (RoCE/IB)
• Fibre Channel (FC)
• TCP (Extends NVMe over any generic network subsystem over IP)

InfoScale claims the NVMe device using NVMe Array Support Library (ASL) which is agnostic to the underlying protocol used by NVMe.

 Supported Environment

• InfoScale Version: 8.x and later
• Operating Systems: Supported Linux distributions with NVMe-oF kernel support
• Storage Devices: NVMe storage devices exposed via NVMe over Fabrics using RDMA/FC/TCP.

Configuration Guidelines

1. Ensure the Linux kernel supports NVMe-oF target on the intended protocol.
2. Device Discovery:
   NVMe/TCP devices should be properly discovered and visible under /dev/nvme* before configuring InfoScale DMP.

Identify NVMe devices and the transport details

Make sure nvme-cli is installed on the host to list the details of the NVMe devices.

Here is an example of NVMe devices on a system:

• 2 directly attached as PCIe device
• 1 is connected using TCP protocol.

If the system has devices connected from other interconnects such as IB/RoCE/FS, InfoScale DMP will seamlessly claim those devices.