5

I have 2 servers Main one is acting server the other one is providing HDD as ISCSI to main server.

Purpose of this setup is Media Streaming sometimes there is transcoding involved. In application I can't use both servers. I can only use one.

My question is related to the IO from 2nd server HDDs to main server to client, Would this be a bad and high latency and slow approach to it? When more storage needed I thought of adding more server to work as the second server and provide HDDs and move to a better and bigger server one it's costly effective etc.

Servers are in a remote DC and both connected using Domain Controller with main server acting as DNS server and 2nd server have main server's ip as DNS provider.

Dave M
  • 4,494
  • 21
  • 30
  • 30
Saeb Msarwa
  • 61
  • 3

1 Answers1

7

iSCSI as a protocol is not limiting performance or latency on spindle (HDD) drives. It may limit on SSD and will limit on NVMe.

The performance in this case depends on:

1) Physical storage. You can increase amount of disk in RAID and use RAID10 for the best one. Video streaming uses large blocks, so properly aligned stripe size may also help.

2) Network between nodes. To eliminate network bottleneck, use 1 GbE or better 10 GbE connection. If you have multiple 1 GbE links, configure multipathing (mpio) and don’t use LACP (NIC teaming) for iSCSI. Here explanation: LACP vs MPIO

3) In some cases, adding additional iSCSI sessions per link may also increase performance.

4) Windows iSCSI Target is also not the quickest one, but it shouldn’t be a bottleneck for HDDs.

Massimo
  • 68,714
  • 56
  • 196
  • 319
batistuta09
  • 8,723
  • 9
  • 21
  • 1
    Thank you very much 1. I'm not using RAID as I'm trying to spread the load. 2. In Data Center they provide vSwitch so I configured server to use it and made 2nd server use dns of the first one 3. will check how to do that, 4. good to know. Thank you again. – Saeb Msarwa Apr 01 '20 at 14:15