NVMe-oF Target Configuration
NVMe-oF Target Configuration
QuantaStor can present Storage Volumes over NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) in addition to iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and CephRBD. NVMe-oF carries the NVMe command set across the network fabric instead of translating through SCSI, giving lower command overhead and deeper queueing than iSCSI on the same media. It is available on both scale-up (ZFS) and scale-out (Ceph) pools.
Transports
- NVMe/TCP — works over any standard Ethernet fabric, no special NIC required.
- NVMe/RDMA (RoCE v2) — requires RoCE-capable NICs on both target and initiator, and a lossless fabric with Priority Flow Control (PFC) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) enabled end to end. Recommended for latency-sensitive block workloads.
How targets are modeled
Each Storage Volume exposed over NVMe-oF gets its own NVMe subsystem, identified by an NQN, the same way it gets an IQN when exposed over iSCSI. Host access is controlled per volume by initiator NQN, directly analogous to iSCSI initiator ACLs, see Managing Host Initiators.
Enabling NVMe-oF on a target port
NVMe-oF is enabled per network port rather than configured as a separate target type.
Via the Web UI: Storage Management > select the storage system > Network Ports tab > select the port > Modify. Check "NVMeoF Portal" (the Network Ports list shows this same setting as an "NVMeoF TCP" column, same flag, inconsistent label).
The dialog also has a "Lossless Networking" checkbox, this is the RDMA/RoCE toggle, it's only selectable when the NIC actually supports it, greyed out otherwise.
Via CLI:
qs target-port-modify --port <port> --nvmeof-enable true
The same option is available when creating a floating service VIF or an HA failover interface, so an NVMe-oF-enabled target can be made highly available the same way an iSCSI target is.
Connecting an initiator
Standard NVMe-oF host tooling applies (Linux nvme-cli, VMware NVMe-oF adapter, etc.). Discover and connect using the target's NQN and portal address as you would for any NVMe-oF target; QuantaStor does not require a proprietary initiator.