{"id":2583,"date":"2010-11-30T19:34:12","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T19:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.open-e.com\/?p=2583"},"modified":"2025-07-03T09:00:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T09:00:02","slug":"a-few-practical-tips-about-iometer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/a-few-practical-tips-about-iometer\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few practical tips about IOmeter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tThere are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first. I have frequently seen users trying to run IOmeter tests without success. Being human, most of us hate to read the manual and with IOmeter this can lead to problems. I hope this short post will help you to get the wanted results. First off, you need to know that IOmeter recognizes 2 different volume types:<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 un-partitioned disks (blue icon disk), or<br \/>\n\u2022 formatted disks (yellow icon with a red slash though it)<\/p>\n<p>With un-partitioned disks you can start the test at once, but to run with formatted disks you need a test file. The test file must be placed in the root directory and named: <strong>iobw.tst<\/strong>. By default IOmeter will create the test file if not found. The problem is that nowadays volumes are very big, and IOmeter runs very slowly. It&#8217;s much faster to create the test file using the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/TestFileCreator.zip\">TestFileCreator.exe<\/a> from Open-E. Please run it in order to create iobw.tst with any size you desire. You can run: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/TestFileCreator.zip\">TestFileCreator.exe<\/a> 100G in order to create a file of exactly 100GB.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/TestFileCreator.zip\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-3573\" style=\"border: 0pt none;\" title=\"Free download\" src=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Free-download1-300x54.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"54\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To find out your storage performance there are a few typical test configurations you may want to run. Here are some example results of a FC Volume created on DSS V6 with FC HBA dual 4Gb and MPIO.<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/IOmeter_Benchmark_results_BLOG.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2593\" title=\"IOmeter_Benchmark_results_BLOG\" src=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/IOmeter_Benchmark_results_BLOG.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"569\" height=\"167\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So, if your goal is to obtain the maximum MB\/sec please create a test set up with 2-4 workers, using a block size of 256k and 100% sequential read or write. In our case the sequential read shows the best result: 772 MB\/sec! Please make your settings very carefully and make sure all workers use the same test configuration! If you forget to add your [256kB, 100% sequential read] configuration to every worker you will be surprised with very low results because the default test settings use 2kB block and mixed random\/sequential and read\/write pattern. So instead of the desired 772MB\/sec you might see 100 times less, i.e. ~ 7MB\/sec.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/products\/open-e-data-storage-software-v7\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-28013\" src=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/blog_open-e.png\" alt=\"Download DSS V7\" width=\"578\" height=\"94\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/blog_open-e.png 578w, https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/blog_open-e-570x94.png 570w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 578px) 100vw, 578px\" \/><\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first.&nbsp;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[798],"tags":[95,228,259,345,668],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tips-tricks","tag-benchmarking","tag-dss-v6","tag-fc-hba","tag-iometer","tag-testfilecreator-exe"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55323,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions\/55323"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}