Paravirtualized SCSI

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Xen PVSCSI

Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) was added to Xen 3.3.0. PVSCSI allows high performance passthrough of SCSI devices (or LUNs) from dom0 to a Xen PV or HVM guest. PVSCSI can be used to passthrough a tape drive, tape autoloader or basicly any SCSI/FC device. By using PVSCSI the guest can have direct access to the SCSI device (required by for example some management tools). PVSCSI can also be used to passthrough multiple SCSI devices or the whole SCSI HBA.

Note that disks (any block device in dom0) can be passed to the Xen guest using the normal Xen blkback functionality, PVSCSI is not needed for that.

PVSCSI requirements

  • PVSCSI requires a scsiback backend driver in dom0 kernel.
  • PVSCSI requires a scsifront frontend driver in the guest kernel.
  • Xen 3.3.0 or newer.

PVSCSI driver availability

PVSCSI drivers can be found from at least the following Xen kernel trees:

NPIV support

Please see the XenNPIV wiki page for more information.

More information and links