IOMeter testing within the Service Console

[sames]

I have started working with IOMeter to measure and tune disk performance on ESX 3.5. I can run IOMeter from within a guest operating system but I can't seem to figure out how to run it from the service console. My intent is to load IOMeter in the service console to test VMFS disk performance for both DAS and iSCSI storage. I tried running Dynamo in the console but failed with this error:

./dynamo: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Is there a way to install IOMeter in the console or must I use a guest OS to acomplish this?

Thanks,

Steve

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the forums - There appears to be Linux version of iometer - check out but I would be leary of running anything in the Service Console -

[vmmeup]

The question would be why? If you get I/O stats from within the service console it won't give you real data on your i/o ps from inside a running vm. If you are trying to compare two storrage systems I would recommend running iometer from inside vm's located on the datastores. Deploy two identical machines...one to DAS and one to iSCSI and test your performance through the vm. Remeber the VM's have virtualized storage drivers and disks so if you are looking to acheive accurate data you need to account for these as well.

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[depping]

I wouldn't install additional software that isn't approved by VMware in the Service Console. And like the others said there really isn't a point for doing that. Use VM's to test the i/o on your lun's!

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

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[ewanat]

I installed the RHEL 3 rpm for iometer but for some reason Iometer doesn't work right (wrong results).

check here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1406694

[oschistad]

As a previous poster also mentioned, running IOmeter or any other sort of benchmark from inside of the service console will not give you any useful data. Firstly, the SC is actually a virtual machine and has to go through the vmkernel to perform disk IO just like any other VM, and secondly the SC is intentionally limited in how much I/O it is allowed to generate. So if you were to run IOmeter you would see that your benchmark runs from inside the SC was much slower than what you'd see from a regular guest VM.

[Visior]

Just read you post, problem we have is we can't pinpoint the IOPS perormance error we have in our SAN topology, we have very poor IOPS and we are trying to figure out if it is at the VMWare Linux kernel or if it's just the VM that give bad result. Is there a way to test the IOPS at the VMWare level first so we have goog compare ?