So I’m the “Very committed contributor” from the NVMeoTCP and ESXi article above LOL. I also have an RDS.
RDS uses in Linux kernel NVMeoTCP from what I can gather and expected. This is why one poster says it just works fine for Proxmox as that is Debian based I’m pretty sure and uses the same NVMeoTCP Linux kernel modules.
If you want a NVMeoTCP Target for ESXi as an initiator, you will indeed need an implementation of NVMeoTCP that supports Fused Commands. The only one of these that is open source to my knowledge is SPDK.io (Also runs in user space with performance benefits) but there is no appliance per se that I have seen for running this, though I’m sure someone might have a pre built container image for it.
There are some enterprise vendors like LightBits Labs that you can get more of a virtual appliance from that are also certified to be an NVMeoTCP Target for ESXi, but sadly I just talked to some folks there the other day and they don’t offer any type of community or homelab license.
If anyone finds a SPDK container image please post, or maybe I’ll just whip one up based on some work from a few years ago.
https://gist.github.com/singlecheeze/0bbc2c29a5b6670887127b93f7b71e3f
Please note I did some janky looping back in my quick and oh so dirty testing of SPDK above as I was only validating that it did indeed work; meeting requirements for ESXi Fused Commands. Performance would probably be much more consistent and maybe I’ll retest without the jank. Many enterprise storage vendors use SPDK in their NVMeoTCP offerings and products to my knowledge.