An NVMe-oF IP-Based SAN consists of Multiple Hosts, NVM Subsystems connected to Network switches that provide the IP connectivity. As the number of endpoints(devices) grow, a NVMe IP-Based SAN becomes difficult to manage with traditional discovery mechanisms that require, administrators to explicitly configure each host to access each of the NVM subsystems. To eliminate the challenges of traditional discovery, automated discovery techniques such as Direct Discovery Controller (DDC)/Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) are recently introduced in the industry, by NVMe experts.

Automated discovery with DDC/CDC, allows administrators to deploy a NVMe-oF IP-Based SAN, at scale.

In this talk, we will share our experience and challenges that we faced while deploying DDC/CDC automated discovery in our lab with a highly scaled NVMe-oF deployment. We will also share the automation test scripts, that we have developed to deploy the DDC and CDC for a large scale NVMe-oF deployment.