Qos Adaptive policy test

[Joedpalma9]

Hello all,

We are using traditional QoS policy groups, and I would like to find out if Adaptive QoS is a better fit for our environment, since our clients are currently getting the same performance regardless of their service tier.

That being said, I need some guidance on how to test this and/or generate IOPS.

I ran a test using the "dd" command to generate I/O on the volume, but it looks like the workload didn't stress the system enough for the adaptive QoS policy to really kick in.

I've researched the 'dd' command, and it seems like it mostly performs large sequential writes and it doesn't generate the kind of random, high-frequency I/O that would properly exercise the QoS policy. I don't have much experience with these type of tests.

Any ideas? I would really appreciate anyone's help!

Thank you,

Joel.

[chamfer · Accepted solution]

Hello @Joedpalma9 ,

It sounds like you are after FIO (Flexible IO Tester).

The below is from the first link that I reference:

Overview and history

Fio was originally written to save me the hassle of writing special test case programs when I wanted to test a specific workload, either for performance reasons or to find/reproduce a bug. The process of writing such a test app can be tiresome, especially if you have to do it often. Hence I needed a tool that would be able to simulate a given I/O workload without resorting to writing a tailored test case again and again.

A test work load is difficult to define, though. There can be any number of processes or threads involved, and they can each be using their own way of generating I/O. You could have someone dirtying large amounts of memory in a memory mapped file, or maybe several threads issuing reads using asynchronous I/O. fio needed to be flexible enough to simulate both of these cases, and many more.

Fio spawns a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of I/O action as specified by the user. fio takes a number of global parameters, each inherited by the thread unless otherwise parameters given to them overriding that setting is given. The typical use of fio is to write a job file matching the I/O load one wants to simulate.

Fio was originally written to save me the hassle of writing special test case programs when I wanted to test a specific workload, either for performance reasons or to find/reproduce a bug. The process of writing such a test app can be tiresome, especially if you have to do it often. Hence I needed a tool that would be able to simulate a given I/O workload without resorting to writing a tailored test case again and again.

A test work load is difficult to define, though. There can be any number of processes or threads involved, and they can each be using their own way of generating I/O. You could have someone dirtying large amounts of memory in a memory mapped file, or maybe several threads issuing reads using asynchronous I/O. fio needed to be flexible enough to simulate both of these cases, and many more.

Fio spawns a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of I/O action as specified by the user. fio takes a number of global parameters, each inherited by the thread unless otherwise parameters given to them overriding that setting is given. The typical use of fio is to write a job file matching the I/O load one wants to simulate.

References:

• 1. fio - Flexible I/O tester rev. 3.41 — fio 3.41-49-gde3d documentation
• GitHub - axboe/fio: Flexible I/O Tester
• Sample FIO Commands for Block Volume Performance Tests on Linux-Based Instances
• We Used FIO to Test AWS. Here’s the Hard Data. | NetApp
• fio-parser/how-to-run-fio at master · mchad1/fio-parser · GitHub

That should give you enough to read through and complete your testing.

I hope that this helps.

[Joedpalma9]

Thank you so very much for the help!!!