A Virtual Godsend For VM Admins
The reveal of new specifications for industry standards like NVMe doesn’t excite everyone, but for some it is always a fun day. If you are one of the latter then the NVM Express consortium has a gift for you, with the release of no less than 11 new specifications from the NVMe 2.4 Base Specification, to NVMe over RDMA Transport 1.3 and NVMe over TCP Transport 1.3. The biggest change is included in the Base Specification and enables a virtual machine manager to rely on native virtualisation built into the SSD.
This means that by abstracting the physical drives you can now migrate a VM onto new hardware without running into issues and needing to reconfigure your storage with every migration. This would have been even more amazing news when flash storage wasn’t egregiously expensive, but it does mean some sysadmins will be able to leverage the bandwidth NVMe SSDs offer when setting up a VM without the current nightmares that can happen if they ever have to migrate the system to a new server.
The Register offers a link to the rest of the new NVMe standards here.
