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So, I have a series of questions into ServerFault about LeftHand SAN's (Questions 1441 and 4478). One of the responses I received questioned the throughput of the iSCSI data returning from the SAN being restricted to the 1GB network card.

I think it is a very good point to look at.

Now to see if this would be an actual bottleneck for my purpose I should perform some benchmarks on the current production server.

What utilities should I use for profiling?
If there are special metrics I should be reading, what are they? IOPS?, Disk Read/Write B/sec?, etc...

Thank you,

Keith

3 Answers 3

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Iometer appears to be the overwhelming recommendation for testing and benchmarking iSCSI SAN performance. Because it is widely used by vendors, its numbers offer a fairly reliable comparison metric across storage systems.

If you plan on running SQL Server off your SAN, you should also look at doing some testing and tuning with SQLIO. Brent Ozar has a great SAN performance tuning guide at SQLServerPedia using the SQLIO tool that's worth checking out.

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  • I use SQLIO with a suite of 16 tests: [read/write]/[sequential/random]/[8/64/128/256kB IOs].
    – aharden
    May 5, 2009 at 20:06
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IOMeter is the tool I normally use for this type of thing...

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  • Does IOMeter come with a command line version, the screenshots suggest it is a GUI application.
    – Stuart Woodward
    Jan 26, 2012 at 1:16
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Bonnie++ is a nice unix benchmarking tool for hard disks. It'll complete a wide variety of tests.

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