KV Block Manager | NVIDIA Dynamo Documentation

The Dynamo KV Block Manager (KVBM) is a scalable runtime component designed to handle memory allocation, management, and remote sharing of Key-Value (KV) blocks for inference tasks across heterogeneous and distributed environments. It acts as a unified memory layer for frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, and TRT-LLM.

It offers:

A unified memory API that spans GPU memory (in future), pinned host memory, remote RDMA-accessible memory, local or distributed pool of SSDs and remote file/object/cloud storage systems.
Support for evolving block lifecycles (allocate → register → match) with event-based state transitions that storage can subscribe to.
Integration with NIXL, a dynamic memory exchange layer used for remote registration, sharing, and access of memory blocks over RDMA/NVLink.

The Dynamo KV Block Manager serves as a reference implementation that emphasizes modularity and extensibility. Its pluggable design enables developers to customize components and optimize for specific performance, memory, and deployment needs.

Feature Support Matrix

Category	Status	Feature
Backend	✅	Local
	✅	Kubernetes
LLM Framework	✅	vLLM
	✅	TensorRT-LLM
	❌	SGLang
Serving Type	✅	Aggregated
	✅	Disaggregated

It offers:

A unified memory API that spans GPU memory (in future), pinned host memory, remote RDMA-accessible memory, local or distributed pool of SSDs and remote file/object/cloud storage systems.
Support for evolving block lifecycles (allocate → register → match) with event-based state transitions that storage can subscribe to.
Integration with NIXL, a dynamic memory exchange layer used for remote registration, sharing, and access of memory blocks over RDMA/NVLink.

Feature Support Matrix

Category	Status	Feature
Backend	✅	Local
	✅	Kubernetes
LLM Framework	✅	vLLM
	✅	TensorRT-LLM
	❌	SGLang
Serving Type	✅	Aggregated
	✅	Disaggregated