Depends on what you're looking for.
IOmeter will only check against what and how you tell it. Say you make a VM on your local, and give it two hard drives - one with the VM on the local datastore, the other on your PS6K. You can run the check against both 'storage paths' to see the difference in one fell swoop without having to move VMs around. If you put the VM OS disk on the SAN datastore and not local, your IOmeter check will be contending with VM access as well while you measure the SAN, potentially 'flavoring' your results. Of course, the same argument can be posed in the local datastore configuration to a much smaller degree. Either way, the VM storage data should not be of significant impact to the results, but it's a great example of situational awareness in storage environments.
It really depends on what data you're after. I personally use IOmeter to generate a load and resxtop from a vMA to see the HBA/storage characteristics. I like IOPS throughput as the metric I start from. Then I can hand out different load characteristics depending on what I expect the cluster to be doing - 60/40 random read/write, 100 read, 100 write, etc. You know what you're looking for best. Tailor the test to what you expect the load to be and dial it in from there. Remember to do it consistently is the last of my advice.
Good luck trooper.
- abe
Integritas!
Abe Lister
Just some guy that loves to virtualize
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