Iometer utility

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Iometer is a utility for measuring input and output (I/O) performance.

Construction

Iometer consists of two program components:

• Iometer GUI is a control program with a user interface, which controls one or multiple Dynamo Worker components and gathers their results. The Dynamo Worker components may be running on multiple systems in the network.
• Dynamo Worker is a I/O load generator, which runs on the target system whose I/O performance is supposed to be measured. It includes:
  • The Workload Generator, which places the system under a load
  • The Measurement Tool, which measures the performance of the I/O operations and records the performance measurements

Iometer GUI

Iometer GUI is the control program with a graphical user interface.

With Iomater, you can:

• configure workloads
• set execution parameters
• start and stop tests

For its part, Iometer:

• tells Dynamo what it should do
• gather the data resulting from Dynamo
• summarizes the results in output files

Only one instance of Iometer should be running at any one time. Iometer is only available for Windows.

Screenshots

Dynamo Worker

Dynamo consists of a workload generator and the measurement tool. At the request of the Iometer program, Dynamo executes I/O operations and records the performance data. It then returns this performance data to Iometer. Several instances of Dynamo may be running at the same time. Typically, one instance will be running on the server (the machine that is also running Iometer). Other instances may be running on other clients.

Dynamo is multithreaded. Thereby, each instance of Dynamo can simulate the I/O load of multiple client programs running in parallel. Each instance of Dynamo that is running is designated a Manager. Within the Dynamo instance, a single thread is called the Worker.

Dynamo is available for the following systems.

• Linux
• Netware
• Windows

Additional Information

• Iometer User’s Guide (iometer.cvs.sourceforge.net)
• Iometer files (sourceforge.net)
• Iometer (en.wikipedia.org)
• HOWTO - Benchmark an iSCSI target (and any block target, including within VMs living in NFS datastores) (Blog virtualgeek.typepad.com)
• Test storage system performance with Iometer (techrepublic.com)