Iometer is a piece of software that is both a workload generator and a measurement tool. It can be run on a local system, or it can generate and measure loads on multiple network systems. As the name implies, Iometer works by generating I/O to a disk target and measuring the IOPS, latency, CPU utilization, and errors. It can be set to generate different I/O sizes, read/write distributions, random/sequential distribution, burstiness, and I/O alignment. Changing these parameters will show how the storage subsystem can handle, say, 4k IOPS versus 32k IOPS.
To step through this recipe, you will need at least one ESXi Server, an instance of installed vCenter Server, and vSphere Web Client. You will also need a VM where you can run Iometer. No other prerequisites are required.
The first step is to download Iometer to the VM where we want to run the tests:
- Download the appropriate executable from http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html.
- Once downloaded, run the...