Contributors: Bharath Kumar Gutha, Yadagiri Rajaboina, Harsha Kotapati, Sai Sri Janani Durai

Overview:

The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over TCP/IP enables fast access to remote NVMe storage devices by using standard Ethernet network. This helps simplify infrastructure, reduce costs and deliver modern NVMe performance without major hardware changes. The following figure depicts the overview of how the host driver and Storage interact with each other over the NVMe over TCP/IP connection.

Starting with AIX 7.3 TL4, this feature is introduced as a Technology Preview and is supported on physical Ethernet adapters with speeds of 25 GbE or higher assigned to the AIX LPAR. We strongly recommend that clients and storage vendors limit testing to non-production environments.

Configuration details:

The host driver instance(initiator) in AIX is represented as tcpnvmeX device with the following attributes:

The host_nqn attribute value must be used for mapping the NVMe over TCP/IP disks on the supported storage server.

To configure and manage the AIX host driver instance (tcpnvmeX), follow the steps provided in the link below:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3.0?topic=initiator-configuring-nvme-over-tcpip-software

By default, AIX creates a tcpnvme0 device. Multiple NVMe over TCP/IP protocol instances(tcpnvmeX) can be configured to support MPIO environments and to achieve higher performance.  The additional host devices should be configured with target information same as tcpnvme0 configuration. 

For detailed steps to configure multiple NVMe over TCP/IP protocol instances, refer to the below link.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3.0?topic=notsi-configuring-multiple-nvme-over-tcpip-software-initiator-devices

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