2 Functional Description
The Virtual Storage protocols that are described in this document provide functionality that supports:
Allowing clients to open a virtual disk file on a remote server message block (SMB) share.
Reading, writing, or closing of a virtual disk file on a remote SMB share.
Allowing clients to close a virtual disk file on a remote SMB share.
Allowing multiple clients to open a shared virtual SCSI disk on a remote share.
Reading, writing, or closing shared virtual SCSI disk files on the target server.
Forwarding of raw SCSI commands and receipt of their results.
The following table describes the available methods of accessing the remote virtual disk, and the advantages and limitations of each.
|
Method of Accessing Remote Virtual Disk |
Advantages |
Limitations |
|---|---|---|
|
Using Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol Version 3 (SMB3) |
Uses commodity storage hardware |
Single-user access |
|
Using SMB3 when using the SMB2 Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Transport Protocol (SMBDirect) as a transport |
Leverages RDMA-capable networks for higher throughputs, lower latencies, and CPU utilization Uses commodity storage hardware |
Single-user access |
|
Using the Remote Shared Virtual Disk Protocol (RSVD) on top of SMB3 |
Multi-user access Uses commodity storage hardware Secure access to files |
|
|
Using RSVD on top of SMB3 when using SMBDirect as a transport |
Multi-user access Leverages RDMA-capable networks for higher throughputs, lower latencies, and CPU utilization Uses commodity storage Secure access to files |
Requires specialized network adapter hardware |
|
Using Internet SCSI (iSCSI) to access the remote virtual disk |
Multi-user access Uses commodity storage hardware |
|