I am looking to use Iometer to measure the throughput of a virtual disk. IBM claim that their VAAI drivers will increase the throughput of virtual disks by 30% using block zeroing. The plan is to use IOmeter to generate a load, and measure the throughput on an ESXI host with and without VAAI drivers. A test VM will be used with a windows guest.
IBM claim they measured the results using IOmeter set up with 1MB sequential writes on a virtual disk.
This is the first time I have used IOmeter. I plan to use Iometer with the following settings:
Transfer request size: 1MB
100% sequential distribution
100% write
I plan to measure the throughput of the virtual disk, using the following counter on the vcenter client:
virtualdisk/write rate kbps
I would prefer to do a discreet test that will not put too much of a load on the SAN, as the server I am testing will be using a production SAN. I tried using IOmeter on my desktop with these settings. It generated load up to 38MB/second at its peak.
Any tips on doing a discreet test on a production LAN, plus validation of the testing plan is appreciated.