By Steve Elwell | June 26, 2018 | SANBlaze Tech.
Why is running NVMe conformance tests against your NVMe drive important? They give you an excellent idea of how well your drive behaves in reference to the NVMe specification. The NVMe Interop & Compliance Working Group (ICC) works with the NVMe organization (http://nvmexpress.org/) to add and modify test cases in the conformance testplan (version 9.0 of the testplan, based off of NVMe specification v1.3, is available here). If your drive can pass all of the tests, you’re in good shape.
The SANBlaze VirtuaLUN software contains scripts for executing the conformance tests. Versions 1.2.1, 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0 are all available. Although you won’t find it in conformance testplan v9.0, the SANBlaze conformance scripts include tests for the Sanitize command. In fact, out of a possible 231 testcases, 94% have been implemented in the VirtuaLUN software and can be executed against NVMe drives accessible via PCIe. Of those 94% that are available, 86% of those test cases can be executed against devices accessible via NVMe-oF.
It does not matter which NVMe specification version your drive supports either. The conformance tests available in the VirtuaLUN will detect which version your drive supports and execute the tests accordingly. For those commands that are optional, the appropriate script will determine if the command is supported and will skip testing the feature if it is not. The length of time to execute the scripts depends on how many features are supported, but typically they take less than half an hour to complete. It’s a quick and easy way to see how well your drive performs in relation to the specification.
The scripts can be accessed and executed via SANBlaze’s Test Manager or SBExpress Manager.
To learn more, contact us.