What:

How to run IOmeter on multiple machines. Here I am using VMs but the same concepts apply to physical computers.

If you have been working in the storage industry, you should already know what is and how to use IOmeter, if you don’t, refer to its manual here.

IOmeter is probably the most usable (easy-to-use) tool for storage arrays to simulate workloads. Sometimes, the CPU, Queue Depths or others factors could be a limitation for reaching the maximum IOPS that the array system can support, here is when more machines running IOmeter (actually Dynamo) at the same time are needed.

Note: This is pretty easy and straightforward, but somehow I keep forgetting it. 😛

How:

First of all:

• Create a 100GB VM, install, run and test IOmeter. (here you have) The capacity depends on the size of the testing file to be used, I think 100GB is a good size.
• Clone this VM after IOmeter has been tested.
• Be sure both or more machines are reachable through the network

Testing both machines:

1. Run IOmeter on the machine you want to use as the master.
2. On the remote machine, right-click on rundynamo and click Edit to open it with Notepad.
3. Or create a .bat file with the following data (Change machine names and IPs):

@echo off
REM IOmeter01
cls
:start
            echo.
            "c:\Program Files (x86)\Iometer.org\Iometer 2006.07.27"\Dynamo.exe -m 192.168.1.10 -n IOMETER01 -i 192.168.1.11
goto start

Be sure that the path is where you really installed IOmeter, and  that Dynamo is there.

• -m to specify the manager IP address, the master machine
• -n is to specify the computer management name (optional)
• -i to specify the IP address of the computer running dynamo the “remote machine” (where this configuration is being made).

Again, from the image above:

• 192.168.1.10 is the master IOmeter/Dynamo
• 192.168.1.11 is the remote machine running Dynamo.

Fine-tune, play around and enjoy your performance test!