HPE Storage Users Group

A Storage Administrator Community




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 2 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: Use Iometer to test performance
PostPosted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:54 am 

Joined: Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:36 am
Posts: 1
Let me introduce myself, I just added a 3PAR 8200 to an existing VMware vSphere infrastructure.
I need to measure 3PAR performance compared to other existing storage.
So, I created a VM and installed Iometer.
I moved the VM on a datastore hosted by the 3PAR and made some tests with Iometer.
Then I moved the VM to another datastore hosted by a different storage and performed the same tests.
Let me ask expert people:
  • Am I using the right tool to compare performance?
  • How should I confngure Iometer to get the more meaningful results?
  • Is there any sample configuration file I can start from?
  • Should I do anything different, given that either the infrastructure and the 3PAR host production VMs and I cannot create problems?
Regards
marius


Top
 Profile  
Reply with quote  
 Post subject: Re: Use Iometer to test performance
PostPosted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 10:32 am 
Site Admin
User avatar

Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:35 pm
Posts: 1328
Location: Dallas, Texas
IOmeter is not a good choice for benchmarking modern arrays because it uses easily deduped data over and over again for writes. IOmeter is easily tricked by advanced array features like thin provisioning and dedupe. Ditch it asap, it hasn't been updated in what, 10 years?

The tool I recommend is VDbench. Its free form oracle. You will have to create a free account on their site to download it.

It takes time, physical resources and good knowledge to do a meaning benchmark. Benchmarking on production arrays, or production ESX hosts is not free from risk. If you do manage to perfect your benchmark plan, then either the array or the ESX hosts will be at 100% util and impact production. If you don't drive it hard enough to cause a production impact, then you are not doing enough to benchmark the system. Its a catch 22.

Parallelism is key. Last benchmark I did used 4 ESX hosts, with 1 VM each. All were tuned with vendor best practices, much of which involved increasing the queue depth of the Guest OS, the Guest virtual machine hardware, and the physical ESX host hardware settings to open the pipes as wide as they could go. There is only so much a single hypervisor IO scheduler will allow and that needs to be leveraged against the capabilities of the array to be benchmarked. You have to size the benchmark platform to meet your requirements.

_________________
Richard Siemers
The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.


Top
 Profile  
Reply with quote  
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 2 posts ] 


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 54 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group | DVGFX2 by: Matt