Hi,
We are running IIS to serve large video files over a LAN. To play in realtime, each client needs to read the files at over 100Mb/s.
We are using Gb Ethernet connections but would like to support 100s of clients.
So we need to scale out.
I have a backend file server that can scale - IIS instances can access this as if it were a NAS (using SMB2).
What are the deployment options/topologies using ARR and NLB to achieve this?
For example, if I just use ARR in front of two IIS boxes, the Gb Ethernet is the bottleneck, so I don't get any more throughput. The AAR instance will be the bottleneck.
However, if I use NLB to load balance, I can aggregate the throughput of a number of IIS boxes.
So I want to use NLB + ARR (I like the ARR healthcheck and layer 7 options AAR offers).
But I don't want to use extra boxes for a NLB/ARR 3 tier approach. I am not scaling out due to CPU load, I am scaling due to network IO.
Can I deploy IIS with NLB and ARR on the same PCs that are running IIS to read from the file share?
How well would this scale? Where are the engineering limits?
OR ... Is there a way to get ARR to forward requests from clients using HTTP 307 Temporary Redirect - so that network IO is then direct between the client and the web server reading from the file share?
Thanks for any help.
Cheers,
James.
James Westland Cain, Ph.D.
Principal Software Architect
Quantel Research & Development
