Out-of-Band Management Command for NVMe devices

This article was posted on the blog of NVM Express, Inc. by Peter Onufryk, NVMe-MI workgroup chair and director of engineering, enterprise computing division, Integrated Device Technology, Inc.

NVMe Basic Management Command

The NVM Express Management Interface (NVMe-MI) workgroup has released a technical note that describes an out-of-band management command for NVMe devices that utilizes an SMBus Block Read operation.

This command provides a standardized method of performing basic inventorying and health status polling of NVMe devices.

The NVMe-MI workgroup is standardizing a comprehensive management architecture that builds on top of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) and allows out-of-band management of an NVMe device over SMBus and over PCIe using Vendor Defined Messages. The NVMe-MI 1.0 specification is expected to be completed later this year and allows a management controller to both monitor the status of an NVMe device as well as configure its state. This enables advanced features such as out-of-band firmware updates.

Prior to completion and availability of the NVMe-MI 1.0 specification, we have received feedback that a standardized method is needed by the industry to poll an NVMe device for basic health status information and which only requires SMBus slave support. The intent of the technical note is to publicly release a standardized approach for such a capability.

Technical note