Distributed iSCSI protocol over Hypervisor Storage on Local Area Network

Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) is a protocol that can run on a TCP/IP transport layer in order to transfer SCSI commands to allow block-level access on storage devices which is standardized by IETF. Hypervisor Storage is the storage abstraction layer on Virtual Machines. This paper examines the performance of iSCSI protocol implementation accessing Hypervisor Storage in Virtual Machine's (guest OS) over Gigabit Ethernet Local Area Network (GE-LAN). The results of this experiment are benchmark with results that we obtained from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server using CIFS/SMB protocol running on the Hypervisor Storage and results obtained from local access on virtual machines. We found that iSCSI has low throughput, heavy utilization of CPU, and high I/O latency compared to CIFS/SMB Protocol on NAS and local virtual disk access results which are significantly similar.