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A customer wants a new server to dedicate to its latest high-transaction Web app. Traffic on the current site is heavy and is expected to double in a year. What's needed is an accurate and reliable way to measure a machine's transaction processing and throughput capabilities to confirm that it can handle the load.
One option is to carbon-copy the customer's last invoice, beef up the RAM and storage, and work it into a proposal. While this might do for some scenarios, it doesn't provide any indication as to a machine's capability. Will the machine process transactions fast enough for the intended database application? Will the system's data throughput speed make it suitable as a media server?
To find out, there are a few simple benchmarks used by the CRN Test Center that can help determine which machines and storage subsystems are best suited to which types of jobs. Using our simple step-by-step procedures, you can do it too.
Step 1: Install IOMeter
IOmeter is a free benchmarking tool originally developed by Intel and now available under the GNU Public License. IOmeter is effective, easy to use and fairly well documented.
The first step is to visit the IOmeter download page and download, install and launch IOmeter on the server under test. There are 32- and 64-bit versions for various operating systems and processor platforms. This tutorial applies to the 32-bit Windows edition version 2006.07.27, which to our knowledge is the latest version and has been the least buggy. This download is a self-extracting file that's 1.7 MB and can be copied to and installed from a USB stick.
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Step 2: Select Disk Targets
Once you've installed and launched the program, IOmeter displays the disk targets tab (above). Here, you'll select one or more storage volumes to be used by IOmeter's worker agents during tests.
All available drives are shown. Tests can include any combination of formatted or unformatted drives, but formatted drives need to be populated with test data by IOmeter. The program does this automatically, but it can take considerable time to fill up large volumes. For this option, we usually monitor the size of the test-data file (iobw.tst) gets to around 20 MB.
Testing raw, unpartitioned drives (or arrays) is faster, and we're told that performance results are the same either way. If more than one worker is used, the drive to test against must be selected for each worker. All workers can test against the same drive or each can access different drives. Network targets (drives) also can be tested, but we're not covering that here.
Also on this screen are various settings, all of which we'll leave alone for now. Later, we'll modify the "# of Outstanding I/Os per target," which above is set to 48. For now, this should be in its default setting of 1.
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