Dell PowerFlex 4.6.x Technical Overview

Persistent discovery

PowerFlex supports persistent discovery with the NVMe over TCP target. When hosts are initially discovered through the persistent discovery controller, they remain connected to the discovery service.

When there is a change in the discovery information that is provided to the host, the discovery controller returns an asynchronous event notification and the host requests the updated discovery log page.

Examples of changes in discovery information are the following:

• A new volume is mapped to the host from a new protection domain.
• A new storage data target is added to the system.
• Load balancing has moved the host connection from one storage data target to another storage data target.

When using this functionality, confirm that the host operating system supports the persistent discovery controller and that it is enabled for the host. This feature is supported with VMware ESXi 8.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, SLES 15.4, and others. For more information, see the NVMe over TCP host configuration in the documentation of the respective operating system.

NVMe over TCP host connects to PowerFlex through persistent discovery, which enables automatic updates of the hosts regarding storage side changes.