Performance testing for an esx server

[ajaymedidi]

Hi ,

I am planning to setup full pledged vsphere home lab. with 2 ESX servers. for that I have chosen assembled server hardware. I buy MB,disk,cpu, mem ... all separately. as of now I bought one server and able to install esx4.1 and esxi4.1 (bare metal) successfully.

I want to test the speed and performance of each component like Mem,cpu,disk,network and shared storage. Is there any performance testing tools are available for free?

thanks in advance

AJ

[idle-jam]

have a look at vmmark, that's how others test their host capability. http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

[Dave_Mishchenko]

There are tools like iperf for network and iometer for disk.  What sort of specs are you talking about and what kind of VM load?  Your overall performance will depend on the nature of the VMs you plan to run.  VMmark is a good tool to provide an overall sense of system performance but it requires additional hosts for vCenter and to run the client workstations.

[J1mbo]

In addition to the above, performance can degrade just under the weight of VMs, not just because of host swapping when the host RAM is overcommitted, but because of the load of servicing the other VMs even when they're idle.  For example on a low-spec home-lab server like the HP ML115 G5, file sharing performance of a Windows VM when it's the only running VM can be a good 50% higher than when there are 15 other VMs on the box, even when those other 15 VMs are idle.  But this aside, disk and RAM are usually the pinch-points.