Method to benchmark max iops between ESX/ESXi and storage

[Toenuff]

I'm looking for a way from the ESX servers to stress test storage so that I can determine my max iops for my existing configuration. Does something exist to help me accomplish this? My main priority is to test performance from a Netapp using NFS, but ideally I would like a solution that can handle SAN, iSCSI, and local disk as well.

[krowczynski]

Hi,

also interested in how do such a benchmark.

MCP, VCP

[Jain]

You can use VMmark

~ Cheers,

~ Jain # Do not forget about points,if you found answer useful

[dnetz]

I think iometer does a good job at measuring actual IOPS and latencies inside a VM. I run Windows 2003 servers with iometer in parallell to test my NFS storage and then process the result with a simple php script to present the different tests on a html sheet. It gets a little tricky when you're dealing with read/write caches and different kinds of network setups but once you take all those extra layers into account you can get some pretty decent numbers.

See http://communities.vmware.com/thread/197844 for a thread devoted to benchmarking ESX(i)

Hope it helps!

[sixpockets]

Hi,

I am one of the Virtualization Solutions Architect at NetApp. Another great resource is this latest protocol performance paper jointly done by NetApp and VMware.

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3808.pdf

This document compares the performance of 4GbE FC, 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI, and 1GbE and 10GbE NFS protocols using both VMware vSphere 4.0 and ESX 3.5 on NetApp storage systems. This document seeks to compare the individual protocol performance and CPU utilization at varying workloads.

Also check out the discussions happening about this paper here:

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2010/01/new-vmware-and-netapp-protocol-performance-report....

Hope this helps,

Abhinav Joshi

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/