A system for communication using emulated LUN blocks in storage virtualization environments includes a first host and an off-host virtualizer. The off-host virtualizer may be configured to generate operating system metadata for a virtual storage device, and to make the operating system metadata accessible to the first host. A first layer of a storage software stack at the host may use the operating system metadata to detect the existence of the virtual storage device as an addressable storage device. The off-host virtualizer may also be configured to provide configuration information at a designated set of block addresses within the virtual storage device. A second layer of the storage software stack may be configured to read the configuration information from the designated set of blocks.