IOMeter Help Needed

[frenchj991]

Hello,

Can someone provide some assistance in regards to IOMeter.  I an finding it difficult to know what settings should be used to properly benchmark our SANS.

I have one iscsi SAN that has 1 array and 2 logical drives.

Read and Write Cache is enabled on the SAN

The Logical Drives drives each have a segment size of 128KB and are RAID5

The Block Size of the VMFS partition is 1MB

What shoud the setting be for Max Disk Size (in sectors)?

How many Outstanding I/O's per target to get the proper performance numbers?

Any Recommends on Access Specifications?

Whats a good time period to run IOMeter?

I have searched and read many posts on IOMeter but the more I read the more I become confused.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

[dbbrow2]

Jeff,

    Look at this thread, http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745, for all you need to know about settings for Iometer and results others have posted.  Notice the creator of the thread will point you to another since the original one I'm referencing was growing too large.  Post your results when done.

[DSTAVERT]

This is also a good site for IOmeter information. http://blog.peacon.co.uk/?s=iometer

J1mbo is frequently online here and may be able to comment.

[SillyBit]

This quick start Iometer tutorial helped me out quite a bit.  It has a video too which is nice.

http://www.itechstorm.com/iometer-tutorial-introduction

I find myself using Iometer frequently these days in an effort to squeeze all potential performance from our NetApp/VMware environment.