Using IOMeter

Excerpted from http://4sysops.com/archives/iometer-measure-disk-performance/

The IOMeter tool can be used to test disk performance, IO transfer rate and IO response time. I used it to pump some traffic (read, write or both) in the network and measure the performance of the ports utilized and trigger threshold crossing events.

Some important points about using this tool are mentioned below:

1. Run this tool as an administrator user.

2. Select the disk targets which are generally in my case remote SAN/LAN disks presented to the host or VM on the hypervisor. You should specify the number of sectors Iometer can use for the performance test otherwise it will use all available disk space and if the disk is huge then the tool just appears to have stuck in “preparing disk”. So set the “Maximum Disk Size” to 1000 sectors as shown below.

3. You should configure the “Access Specifications”. Any pre-configured specification (like “512B; 100% Read; 0% random”) can be used for basic traffic related tests.

4. Start the performance test by clicking the green flag button on the toolbar.

5. IOMeter will prompt for specifying the results.csv file where it will log the test results.

6. Now go to the “Result Display” tab as shown below to watch the result. You can set the update frequency to 3 or 5 secs to watch the updates in real time.

7. To end the test, click the Stop button on the tool bar.