XenServer & iSCSI SAN Benchmarking

[cobalt]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of setting up a Xenserver pool that uses a shared iSCSI drive to store virtual machine disk images(An iSCSI drive is a raw partition or block device that's exported over a network, kind of like a NFS share).

I'm curious as to what would be considered best practice for benchmarking this iSCSI disk. I have created a Centos 6.2 virtual machine with Phoronix-Test-Suite 3.6 installed. I have run several disk benchmarks but several of the results are unrealistic and claim to be faster than the network could possibly handle. I presume this is due to local caching of the disk.

So whats the best way to get real results?

Thanks.

[Michael]

What tests did you try? Iozone and tiobench may run into caching issues depending upon your system configuration and test settings, but others should be good. Have you tried like postmark or fs-mark?

[cobalt]

I was testing with iozone and tiobench, I'll give postmark and fs-mark a shot and see what I get.

Thanks for the advice.