vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
stefano-garzarella.github.io
vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#2> One of the significant benefits of vDPA is its strong abstraction, enabling the implementation of virtio devices in both hardware and software—whether in the kernel or user space. This unification under a single framework, where devices appear identical for QEMU facilitates the seamless integration of hardware and software components.
I honestly don’t know what this means. Is it faster? Is it more secure? Why would I use this vDPA thing instead of the good’ol virtio blk driver? Looking at the examples it certainly looks more cumbersome to setup…
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#3> One of the significant benefits of vDPA is its strong abstraction, enabling the implementation of virtio devices in both hardware and software—whether in the kernel or user space. This unification under a single framework, where devices appear identical for QEMU facilitates the seamless integration of hardware and software components. I honestly don’t know what this means. Is it faster? Is it more secure? Why would…
Software block devices let you do all implement all sorts of disk-like things in userspace. nbdkit is a more flexible version of this (also compatible with qemu), so to get a flavour of the types of things you can do just peruse the list of nbdkit plugins: https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit.1.html#Plugins
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#4Good timing considering the esxi news https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#5Good timing considering the esxi news https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US
No more free at all? I learned virtualization w/ vmware gsx long before I ever had a company to use it at.. Oh well, vmwares irrelevant to me nowadays.
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#6Good timing considering the esxi news https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US
> Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability).
So it’s subscription or bust? Owch.
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#7> One of the significant benefits of vDPA is its strong abstraction, enabling the implementation of virtio devices in both hardware and software—whether in the kernel or user space. This unification under a single framework, where devices appear identical for QEMU facilitates the seamless integration of hardware and software components. I honestly don’t know what this means. Is it faster? Is it more secure? Why would…
I don't get it either, and I'm a maintainer of SPDK which provides multiple implementations of virtualized devices and is frequently used inside DPUs to present storage devices.
If I'm implementing a hardware device anyway, why would I not just use NVMe as the interface? NVMe is superior to virtio-blk in every way that I can think of.
Even for a software device in userspace, why not use a technology like vfio-user to present an NVMe device, or just use vhost-user to present the virtio-blk device?
I've never really been able to get a clear value proposition for vDPA for storage laid out for me. Maybe I'm missing something critical - it's certainly possible.
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#8> One of the significant benefits of vDPA is its strong abstraction, enabling the implementation of virtio devices in both hardware and software—whether in the kernel or user space. This unification under a single framework, where devices appear identical for QEMU facilitates the seamless integration of hardware and software components. I honestly don’t know what this means. Is it faster? Is it more secure? Why would…
Ceph Block Device 3rd Party Integrations: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/rbd/rbd-integrations/ :
Kernel Modules, QEMU, libvirt, Kubernetes, Nomad, OpenStack, CloudStack, LIO iSCSI Gateway, Windows, qemu: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/rbd/qemu-rbd/#qemu-and-block...
`cephadm bootstrap` requires docker or podman and ssh: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/cephadm/install/#bootstrap-a...
Ceph Object Gateway: radosgw: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/radosgw/ :
> The Ceph Object Gateway provides interfaces that are compatible with both Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift, and it has its own user management. Ceph Object Gateway can use a single Ceph Storage cluster to store data from Ceph File System and from Ceph Block device clients. The S3 API and the Swift API share a common namespace, which means that it is possible to write data to a Ceph Storage Cluster with one API and then retrieve that data with the other API.
virtio-blk is probably faster, but then do HA redundancy with physically separate nodes and network io anyway; or LocalPersistentVolumes
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#9Good timing considering the esxi news https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US
I really wonder how much longer the VMUG licensing is going to be around...
Re: vDPA: Support for block devices in Linux and QEMU
#10Good timing considering the esxi news https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US
Wow, I knew things were getting really bad with VMWare, but I didn’t know they had got that bad… I liked ESXi, the free hypervisor was a good stepping stone to get people into the ecosystem and probably sold a lot of vSphere and vCenter licences down the line.
Very glad I decided to use Proxmox (as the Broadcom acquisition had been announced) for the small cluster we set up at our business a year ago, it’s been super stable, pretty easy to use but can do way more than I need (we’re not doing much that is that complicated yet)