Open Source Summit Europe + ELC Europe 2017

Fibre Channel is a widely deployed SAN technology. It does provide for a native virtualization support in the form of NPIV (N_Port Id Virtualisation). Unfortunately the Linux implementation, which presents the NPIV port as a SCSI Host, does not lend itself easily to virtualisation with QEMU. Currently QEMU can only forward individual PCI devices and block devices, but no easy way exists to specify how NPIV devices can or should be forwarded. Furthermore, all devices and possibly the partitions and filesystems therein are exposed to the host, which may cause security concerns. This talk will describe the possible solutions for FC virtualization at both the Linux and QEMU levels, and their relative advantages and disadvantages. A short introduction to FC concepts will be included, covering the protocol, HBA and operating system levels.