[pve-devel] FW: vhost-user-blk protocol in Proxmox

[Davide Villa]

Hi
We’re more and more approached by partners who are looking to improve performance for Proxmox virtualization environment for use cases such as databases, AI workloads, and other resource-intensive tasks. 
In order to maximize storage subsystem performance within virtual machines, some of them even go as far as porting the iothread-vq-mapping changes from QEMU to Proxmox (https://github.com/dominiaz/iothread-vq-mapping).
When testing vhost-user-blk together with our user space RAID engine (xiRAID OPUS), created based on Opensource SPDK in Proxmox, we achieve maximum performance with minimal latency and minimal resource consumption.
In addition, as xiRAID Opus runs on top of SPDK, we eradicate the linux dependency as there’s no need to update Proxmox kernels.

The only problem with using the vhost-user-blk protocol in Proxmox is the inconvenience of administration. 

In order to simplify deployments, we have few questions to you:
1. Does the Proxmox team plan to support vhost-user-blk in your installations?
2. What limitations does the Proxmox team see in using this protocol in a production environment?

We look forward to your feedback and further cooperation to help joint customers.
Best regards
Davide Villa
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)
+39 3462185277
davide.villa at xinnor.io | https://xinnor.io/