What does Enhanced Discovery mean?

NVM Express over Fabrics

The NVMe-oF 1.1 specification included several framework improvements to make NVMe-oF implementations easier. These improvements included enhanced discovery features, officially defined in ratified Technical Proposal (TP) 8002. This TP added persistent controller support for discovery to notify hosts when the fabric configuration changes. NVMe-oF 1.0 discovery offered the following capabilities:

  • The ability to discover a list of NVM subsystems with namespaces that are accessible to the host
  • The ability to discover multiple paths to an NVM subsystem
  • The ability to discover controllers that are statically configured

NVMe-oF 1.1 specification added the following enhanced discovery features:

  • The optional ability to establish explicit persistent connections to the Discovery controller
  • The optional ability to receive Asynchronous Event Notifications from the Discovery controller

For more detailed information on NVMe-oF discovery services, please refer to page 40 of the NVMe-oF 1.1 specification.